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Radical Problems. 



BY 



C. A. BARTOL. 




\-^^" 



^■rCOPYR!^. 



,-J 






BOSTON: 
ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1872. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by 

C. A. B A R T O L, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 



CAMBRIDGE: 
PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON. 



\ 



CONTENTS. 

— • — 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Open Questions i 

II. Individualism 28 

III. Transcendentalism 61 

IV. Radicalism 98 

V. Theism 119 

VI. Naturalism 153 

VII. Materialism 169 

VIII. Spiritualism 195 

IX. Faith 210 

X. Law 245 

XI. Origin 262 

XII. Correlation 284 

XIII. Character 300 

XIV. Genius : Father Taylor 323 

XV. Experience 349 

XVI. Hope 362 

XVII. Ideality 391 



RADICAL PROBLEMS. 



I. 

OPEN QUESTIONS. 

WHAT legislators sometimes say is true of all 
questions : they may be divided. Life looks 
like a page disfigured with interrogation-points ; and 
every ansv\^er breeds new curiosity, as if it were a 
polyp. The child is an incarnate question, posing all 
his elders ; and the widening circle of light subtends 
such a broader round of darkness as to give color to 
the old sage's remark, — " One thing I know, that God 
hates inquisitiveness ; " while many, like Lord Bacon, 
value investigation superficially for its results of utility, 
despairing of absolute truth. But experience and 
memory are tests that all inquiry is intrinsically pre- 
cious. I call to mind a college excursion with the 
mathematical professor, to measure with instruments, 
by triangulation, the distance between some towns in 
Maine. How far it was I have long since forgot, 
but not the wonderful delight of the experiment, the 
new dignity of the search for hill- tops of observation, 
nor the cup of tamarind water a good woman, honor- 
ing our errand, gave to the thirsty, foot-sore wanderers 
by the way. We are glad at every solution of a 



3 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

problem ; yet queries are the intellectual miser*s 
hoard, in whose satisfaction by successful study he 
would not rejoice, but that other queries take their 
place. I fancy a shade of sadness tinged the exultation 
of Columbus when the Western hemisphere showed 
signs of its neighborhood to his vessel, to unbury the 
mystery of the deep, and give an interpretation to the 
magnificent dream he had so soon to exchange for 
ungrateful facts. To guess pleases as to find out the 
conundrum, riddle, or buried city. Our first concep- 
tion equals in pleasure any verification. The hen is 
not happier among the brood she is so anxious about 
than in her nest ; and in the mind's incubation there 
are no heavy hours, but Time blends with Eternity, so 
deep and peaceful is its flow. 

In all pursuit there is a certain dignity. The 
money-making we despise is nobler than profuseness, 
and is often not avarice of acquisition, but activity of 
worthy powers ; so that a sincere Croesus said, if his 
children had as much comfort in spending as he in 
accumulating his fortune, he should be content. It is a 
pulpit lamentation, as shallow as it is doleful, that we 
are but getting ready to live, as also that poet line, — 

" Man never is, but always to be blest." 

Let me join the enterprise, share who will the fruit ! 
To go with Cortes was better than Mexican gold ; and 
my friend's expedition to Alaska is of more worth than 
any plant or precious fur. You buy your land and 
build your house, arrange the orchard and trim the 
garden-grounds, and then expect your reward. Fool- 
ish, if you count on any recompense sweeter than you 



OPEN QUESTIONS. 3 

had as you went along ! No peach or pear will be 
more delicious than your thought in setting out the 
trees. My neighbor grew weary of his perfect situa- 
tion, and wanted to cross the bay and occupy a lonelier 
point. 

There is a movement-cure for the mind. Of one not 
established in his views, it is said in pity, " He is all 
afloat ;" as if that were not the best condition, grander 
and safer than to be ashore, — as if there were a finer 
spectacle of ships, in port than of the yacht-squadron 
racing along the coast, or the grating of my keel on 
the beach could be such transport as to be rocked in 
my boat on the waves. The anchor, said one, is a 
true emblem : it holds the vessel fast, though it does 
not hold the vessel still. But the eternal heaving 
underneath is a signal that the true state is to hoist at 
the windlass, and away ; and no figure of Hope leaning 
on the fluke is jiist to its nature of exploration without 
end. . There is provision for further growth in the 
bones of the skull and organs of the brain after the 
sutures are closed : let there be space to expand in 
the hardest understanding. 

Freedom is not caprice, but room to enlarge. There 
is a certain shock from the pavement to whoever 
returns from roaming among the mountains or by the 
sea. The city streets, like broad curtains or enormous 
window-blinds, shut us in ; and we feel robbed of the 
elements — light, air, earth, and water — which make 
the liberty of our frame, and are better than any 
physician's medicine-chest for every nervous disease. 
We want not only so much sun and oxygen as can be 
got into a chamber, the drink a bottle will hold, and 



4 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

ground enough, like a caged tiger, to pace to and fro 
in, — but to breathe the whole atmosphere, behold the 
sky full of radiance, put our lips to the living spring, 
and have no goal for our feet. Civilization increases 
liberty, which is not, as jurists say, its price. When 
institutions become bounds, the soul is cramped. 
Forms and ordinances multiplied and made essential 
to salvation feel sepulchral, like some walled town of 
Quebec whose old defences stand against enemies long 
since passed away. All creeds and rituals are on the 
defensive against benefactors who open the question 
of their truth, and stop them with a challenge for the 
loyal pass-word. Jesus well prescribed for our com- 
munication, nay^ ^2<^JK) as well 2i?, yea^ yea. I admired 
the little girl who to my questions rolled out a succes- 
sion of clear noes round as a revolver's bullets, — a 
sign that the footing I should be on with her would 
never become a swamp of good-nature ; and was 
pleased with the yearling boy who said, plain as he 
could, " Hands off!" to those who would seize him, 
issued his declaration of independence that he was 
no lump of dough to be kneaded, but a block of 
marble to be turned into beauty by some artist's skill. 
Establishments must answer for themselves to him by 
and by ! 

The dogmatic look is stupid ; the inquiring, bright, 
like that of people eager in the chase. So we can 
explain the extreme changes in the same countenances. 
How uninteresting when they are close, with nothing 
to impart or receive, like the shut bivalve on the tide- 
less flats ! People who have made up their minds, 
and are fixed, as they say, resemble merchants taking 



OPEN QUESTIONS. e 

account of stock, or householders making an inventory 
of their goods, instead of venturing bold purchase, 
exercising hospitality, or driving a brisk trade. Light- 
houses by day are useless for guides ; and your system 
of theology, which no ever-burning thought illumi- 
nates, is an old vase or lantern that lost its lamp long 
ago. I observe the face of that young woman settling 
upon the lees of religious reflection, — how plain and 
ugly the features are ! Anon she comes to me, earnest 
in study, ready to compare notes, and so handsome I 
cannot believe my own eyes. 

We are made for spiritual progress. Our organism 
hints for its object perpetuation of the race. But the 
easy propagation of vulgar specimens, and the num- 
ber of noble members of mankind without posterity ; 
the decease of genius and virtue leaving no issue, 
though the trustees of those shining glories have 
descendants also from their loins ; or the too much or 
little of some parental element, giving insanity, eccen- 
tricity, or idiocy, instead of the expected soundness, — 
force us to conclude there are ends beside earthly 
inheritance and continuance. Jesus and Paul and 
Washington have no heirs ; and to how many might 
Shakspeare's sonnets to one who was cheatinp- the 
world with barren singleness be addressed ! Without 
intentions of development outreaching fleshly designs, 
men would come down to the level of animals and 
plants. In the unfolding of truth is the honor of our 
species and the immortality of every soul ; and for this 
all questions of truth must be opened. One thing is 
sacred, — the sincere thought ; and the being of God, 
character of Jesus, ultimacy of Christianity, reality of 



. 6 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

heaven, must be discussed. If, in the old Bible hyper- 
bole, the scheme of redemption is so fine the angels 
desire to look into it, surely we are not forbid. 

Doubtless, in the wide charter of freedom, offensive 
and extravagant things will be said. The remedy is 
not to mind them. Defy incendiaries not by watch- 

"^ men and engines, but by building fire-proof! Why 
be ti'oubled everybody does not think like you of 
Christ ? Tell the defamer of your Master his battery 
is too weak or your constitution too strong for a shock. 
Not only children, but childish opinions, are the better 
for a little wholesome neglect. Irrational rationalists, 
rootless radicals, and infidels for pride or promi- 
nence of unbelief, are to be let severely alone. Only 
they who have something to say are, with refutation 
or welcome, to be met. Set your castle-walls and 
windows too high for the malicious to bombard or 
break with stones. Are you disturbed by a doctrine ? 
Surely it has ground ! There must have been some- 
thing in the book, or Paine's " Age of Reason " would 
not have hurt so much or lasted so long. Calvin 
would not have burnt Servetus could he have other- 
wise answered his argument. Jonathan Mayhew said 
the foes of freemen in Church and State, in default of 
logic, knocked out their brains, and so furnished an 
effectual reply. That man, you say, is a common 
scold. Take no notice of him, if you would give him 
better than he sends. Recrimination of others crimi- 

y nates you, and is the recriminator's proof. Solomon 
says a fretful wife is like a bitter rain. Let her rain 
under as it rains on the roof, and heed either storm 
alike ! Oaths and remonstrances in the street are 



OPEN QUESTIONS. 7 

answered every day by not stopping to parley, but 
simply keeping on. You resist only when wrestled 
with : the most terrible are the speechless retorts. 
What an iconoclast ! you say. I see not that he breaks 
any thing. He is impotent who bolts or is schismatic 
without cause. Outrageous expressions ! you declare. 
I am not outraged. The community is not absorbed 
in the barking of dogs. Treat the irritable controver- 
sialist, who makes a question of every statement, as 
travellers do the brainless cur who thinks it his duty 
to run every moment and growl at the gate. I walk 
right by the guns on the Common bellowing so loud, 
that have no shot in them for all the noise and blaze, 
and despised the loud manifesto of a farmer's dog 
when I learned he had no teeth, though I saw some 
boys in an English preserve scared by a c-anine mon- 
ster alike destitute ; and there are critics that mouth 
and bay, but draw no blood. I suspect the dogs Paul 
told his friends to beware of had something to say, or 
could bite. 

So God himself sets limits to the objector in the 
weakness of the objection, and dispenses us from all 
need to bridle others' tongues, or, like Louis Napoleon 
with his throne of bayonets, to muzzle the press. 
Truth cannot be disproved, purity cannot be libelled, 
nor wisdom overthrown. Repression of free inquiry is 
not too much ridiculed in the proverb that a cat may 
look upon a king. I thought, said one, our house in 
the great September gale would go, till I remembered 
it was founded on a rock. A basis in the eternal rock 
who can shake? Pay not folly the compliment of fear. 
It takes a deep sound to reverberate. What you do 
not echo, do not dread. 



8 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

But conservatives distinguish between questions of 
science and questions of faith : the first are open ; not 
the last, which no theories of nature can affect. To 
all criticisms of the Scripture history or cosmogony- 
one answer is made : that the Bible does not mean to 
teach natural knowledge. Doubtless the sentiment of 
faith lies deeper than the understanding which the 
peace of God passes. Yet articles of faith are ame- 
nable to the intellect. We distinguish that, too, as a 
general power, from any logical conclusions. But it 
is not true that any feeling is independent of the judg- 
ment. Jesus bids us love God with all our mind as 
well as heart ; and the Divine way, not our imper- 
ceptiveness, is the basis of our trust. We are learning 
that horses do not travel better, with more courage or 
safety, for blinders ; and the soul is no swifter for duty 
or loftier in aspiration for being hoodwinked. Igno- 
rance is not the mother of devotion, but of superstition 
and obsequious flattery ; not of service, but of servility. 
We worship the King in the world he makes his crys- 
tal palace. Has our idea of the building nought to do 
with our prayer? Had a Ptolemaist as much cause to 
ascribe glory to God as a Copernican .^ If to Alphonso 
creation was on the old notion so misfashioned he 
thought he could, if present, have given the Creator 
useful hints, his regard for the Architect must have 
been lessened by the faults of the house, which Scho- 
penhauer held so enormous he saw nothing to praise 
and could not adore at all, leaving us a book not deserv- 
ing to be opened, and a portrait we should fain turn 
to the wall, save that the pessimist was so honest and 
brave. The Deity in Genesis that made such short 



OPEN QUESTIONS. 9 

business of the world, doing it up in six days, — like 
some master workman, called a driver because he 
gets through and throws off so many affairs in the 
twenty-four hours, or a jobber stopping a moment, 
then off on some other errand, like Jehu with his team, 

— wins not the reverence we pay to Him who works in 
spaces no geometry can measure, and through periods 
no numerals can express. 

Faith not touched by sight, taking no guidance or 
glory from the eye of the mind ? The God that com- 
manded Abraham to sacrifice his son, or prompted 
Jacob to plot with his mother to rob Esau by practis- 
ing on father Isaac with his anachronism of false hair, 

— there are people not a few, and ever becoming more, 
who cannot believe. The old altar-fires are gone out, 
and we can no more go back to the Hebrew notions 
than to the lambs and goats of their sacrifice. Science 
is to be minister in the new temple not completed yet, 
and will bring abundant fuel to the shrine to feed the 
flame. The one Jehovah of the Jews, presiding over 
a narrow province, is expanding to the manifold Per- 
vader of an infinite sphere. His unity is verified by 
analogies, of whose extent and clearness Moses or 
Jesus gave no hint, but modern investigation shows 
the universe kindling and alive with. When from the 
leafing of plants to the orbits of planets a law of rela- 
tion is traced, the words, / am^ and there is none 
beside me^ gather a wider sense than in their first 
utterance. As the soft aurora and the rending thunder 
suggest a common electricity, whose spending is fol- 
lowed by cold, we catch a glimpse of threads that 
stretch through the firmament and sew all parts of 



lO RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

God's live garment together finer than any handiwork 
or conception of man. 

The keeping open of the questions has, more than 
any closure of them, promoted piety. Religion would 
have been crushed, if not quenched, by any authority 
to solve them at whatever Hebrew or Christian time. 
Could terms of salvation have been written down, and 
the plenary verbal inspirationists have succeeded in 
the final settlement they undertook, the Church would 
have been banished from the circle of light, degraded 
below the arena of controversy, and dismissed from 
the region of intelligence as no subject of.reason, but a 
motive to grovel and cringe like abject savages in a fit 
of terror, too gloomy to be streaked with the twilight 
of doubt for a reminder and herald of the dawn. If 
we would be rid of denial, danger, and despair, we 
must keep every thing open : the conventicle, com- 
munion, caucus, hall, and railway track, whose clog- 
ging by some untimely train is occasion of ruin and 
death. The thought of vast assemblies for musical 
celebrations of peace and international friendship — 
nobler than that division of the spoils at which the so- 
called Internationals^ are, let us trust, falsely under- 
stood to aim — has had such fortune as to be accepted 
now for an inspiration, till we at last invite to wave 
together amid strains of harmony the flags of all the 
kingdoms and republics of the earth, type of a Com- 
mune worthy to have. Eaith must not in its pro- 
portions fall below the generosity of amusement and 
politics, or lag in corners out of sight. Let the Dog- 
matist give place to the Liberal ! When Jesus repre- 
sents the Judge as setting the goats on the left hand, 



OPEN QUESTIONS. II 

he may refer not to the lascivious but stubborn nature 
of the beast, which even in tender years rears on its 
hinder legs to butt at your kindest approach. If the 
bigots are so typified, they will turn up in unexpected 
places. Let them reasonably suffer the love that 
would emancipate them from their fetters ; and not, 
like the cross cow I saw, hook the benefactor that 
would untether the bonds from their own feet. 

Free inquiry is more than a prerogative of one man 
against the interference of another. The variety of 
questions we ask, as of wants we feel, is the length 
of our scale, and measures the dignity of our being : 
let us pity the angels if, as we are told, they have 
found out the secret of Nature and know all. The 
animals seem to inquire little, and maybe classified 
according to the signs they show, in their several tribes, 
of wishing to learn. The summer-flies stiffen, curl 
up, and wither in the autumn wind, without any 
apparent queries what death is, or any dread of their 
fate. Their incuriosity marks the degree of their in- 
feriority. Our interest in the subject, our constitution 
to entertain the problem. Job's desire to understand, 
If a man die^ shall he live again P — is the token of 
immortality ; for it is no creation of our will, no fiction 
of man, but the instigation of God, who hints nothing 
he will not carry out. Shall not the lower creatures 
we lord it over, and are so cruel to, have his vindica- 
tion also ? The cook told the complaining duck, " Do 
not cry : all these things will be explained to you 
by and by." Of how much we are as ignorant as the 
bird seized in the barn-yard, or under the doom of 
the fowler's gun ! 



12 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Every theological system or sect Is an attempt to 
close questions ; and every prophet's word a new erup- 
tion through the old crust of conventionality. The 
denominations are so many extinct craters, only like 
^tna or Vesuvius showing signs of activity, and every 
little while breaking out afresh. What is the deadest 
conservatism is only a short lull, a temporary sleep. 
Like the son of Agamemnon, the searching mind 
comes terrible to purify. Unitarianism, Universalism, 
Episcopacy, the English Church, and the Romish, are 
all rumbling with pent-up commotions, and out of the 
fiery contention in their own bowels ready to throw up, 
like the aiguilles round Mont Blanc, rival summits of 
belief; and any undertaking to shut up and seal the 
questions respecting God and man and heaven, Bible 
or Saviour, prophecy or worship, is like chaining 
down the safety-valve of the engine or binding too 
tight the breathing-holes of the globe. Destructive 
explosions, earthquakes that swallow up cities, ensue. 

But is every thing left at loose ends like a feather on 
the wind ? No : questions of doctrine must be open, 
but questions of conscience closed before the day 
passes, and the opportunity is lost. No moral problem 
has many links. Open questions in a house about 
trivial matters are like open wounds. Of what bits 
we build our heavy cross ! Do not spend the day 
discussing whether you shall drive or walk, invite a 
guest or accept an invitation, wear white or black, 
write a letter, rub out a spot, be on speaking terms 
with a neighbor, or have honest acquaintance with 
any woman or man. Time is valuable, nerves are 
precious. " I cannot," said a man, making thousands 



OPEN QUESTIONS. I3 

every day, " consume my strength in debates with 
boys whether they shall steal my grapes or run across 
my shed." Have no open questions to quarrel about 
and generate in your affections chronic disease. It is 
better to decide a case wrongly than to get into a 
wronp- state of mind. You are sincere and conscien- 
tious in your respective views : do not, therefore, be 
tyrannical to insist and urge them past all patience, 
and reopen the topic for bickering without cessation 
or fruit. Make not your conscience a torment. The 
w^orst thing in the world may be a man's conscience, 
or what, like Launcelot Gobbo, it is his- humor to 
call such. His sting is not that of the bee laden 
with honey, but the barren wasp. As lief have a 
hornet buzzing round your ears, or gad-fly searching 
for the sore spot, as a domestic or social critic falling 
fatally on your weak side. A duellist may be par- 
doned for finding out the armor's open joint or inex- 
pert pass of his adversary; but there should be no 
challenge between friends. Spare in your associate, 
him or her that leans on your bosom, the tender place. 
Aggravate not already existing inflammation, but heal 
and soothe. " Dwelling together In unity is like oint- 
ment," says the Psalmist : there is no salve like silence, 
and no blister of mustard or Spanish flies equal to a 
fresh plaster of interrogatory words. I do not wonder 
the poor Malay sailor begged the captain either to 
whip or scold him, but not do both together; for 
that, like the multiplication-table to Marjorie Fleming, 
is what human nature cannot endure. People are 
prosecuted for assault and battery ; but the language 
I they fling is harder than their fists. It Is against tlie 



14 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 



law for private persons to carry arms ; but what stiletto 
or pistol is so dangerous as a tongue ? It is harder to 
hold than a bull by the horns. I fancy that excellent 
actor, Walter Montgomery, followed to England by 
the woman of ill repute, declaring she would be his 
wife, who two days after the wedding destroyed him- 
self, whatever she suffered at his hands, suffered 
something from her lips. Little vexations, more 
than enormous crimes, lay waste our joy, and turn 
life from a boon to a ban. They say the Inquisi- 
tion is abolished : it has an emissary in every house. 
The mosqiJito has an open question whether he shall 
insert his lancet, and take his fill of your blood, which, 
to settle the matter, you might freely let him do, but 
for the host of his peers on a like surgical errand 
behind ; and there is a sort of mosquito-mind always 
alert to consider w^here most to your disadvantage, and 
the security of its satisfaction against your comfort, it 
can make its petty attack. Be not that name for 
Satan, the accuser of your brethren. Put your con- 
science to private use. Keep it in your closet for a 
probe, not unsheathe it as a sword. The unhealthy 
action of the human frame is rightly called disorder : 
what shall be said of those that disease us with their 
moral complaints and uncharitable judgments } They 
are authors of the worst maladies, and most contagious. 
Our Orthodox friends well bid us beware of the plague 
of our own heart ; for it is catching, whether yellow 
fever and cholera be so or not. Does anybody in your 
circle desire to lead.^ Let him not communicate to 
you that itch ! Ivy or the wild sumach is not poison- 
ous to some vigorous people. But we do not phiiit 



3 



OPEN QUESTIONS. I5 

the shrub or vine at our door-sill : we give a wide 
berth to- the deadly night-shade, even in the pasture ; 
and we learn to avoid folks who envenom us with 
their manners and speech, and by their very glance 
disturb, as some cannot look at or brush by the evil 
plant but their skin will prick and swell. " This 
creature worries the life out of me," said one, of a dog 
biting and scratching only in play. But ill-temper 
has worse teeth and claws ; and, of all the gifts dis- 
tributed among human beings, the least to be coveted 
is the positive genius some disputatious persons have 
for making everybody unhappy, dealing in questions 
only, and accepting no one's reply. 

Qiiestions of action and disposition are somehow, at 
length, to be closed. I must decide if I am going in 
tlie cars or the steamer. If any temper of envy or 
jealousy enter the lists and contest the prize, it will 
be master or I shall. To settle moral questions is 
safe ; for no man ever decided to be a drunkard or 
profligate, however sin take advantage of his indecision 
to make him a slave. Foster's Essay on Decision of 
Character was wise. 

But questions of doctrine cannot be wholly closed ; 
because, first, words are inadequate to express all the 
truth. Some conclusions about finite things abide 
beyond any power to shake. Kepler's and Newton's 
laws of attraction hold like theorems in the mathe- 
matics. The effects of food and poison on the human 
system are demonstrable, though it is disputed if alcohol 
be food or medicine. The physiological and intellect- 
ual analogies run further between man and the brute 
with every day's investigation ; and plants disclose 



r 



l6 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

similitudes reminding one of the classic Dryads and 
voices of trees complaining when the limbs were torn. 
Iron, in the shape of filings about the roots, is given 
to a pear-tree to prevent or cure a disease appearing as 
spots on the fruit, — just the tonic the doctor prescribes 
to his patient ; and lime strengthens it as it does our 
teeth and bones, while it drinks every day, or like an 
animated creature dies of thirst. But when we come 
to inquire what God is, or the soul is, or life or death 
is, or what we are before or after our mortality, our 
most earnest convictions cannot be precipitated as a 
solution or projected like a chart. They refuse the 
confinement of a creed. The longevity of a dog or 
horse, eagle or elephant, is fixed ; but of a spirit there 
is no report. There are no terms to express it, or our 
persuasions about it, unless we have made up our mind 
that this mind is a mode of matter, the phosphorescence 
of decay, like some vegetable and animal particles ceas- 
ing to shine when it ceases to rot. We can compass 
the definite with ease. What is done in secret or 
whispered in the ear in closets will come abroad and 
be published on the house-top ; for an occurrence is 
impossible to hide, or a noise to be unheard. Do not 
tell anybody, we whisper. It is a vain request ! It 
will be known because it is a fact ; and every fact is 
matter of knowledge. But the celestial realities defy 
aught but a hint in speech. Because, says the sceptic, 
they are so vague, have no solidity more than moon- 
shine. But is moonshine nothing? Is it less than the 
stifi:^ and ponderous clod ? 

'.' How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! '* 



OPEN QJJESTIONS. I 7 

Lorenzo in the play showed Jessica all the orbs of 
heaven in tune ; and the glories of paradise gleam 
through this same moonshine, as you call it, of the 
mind, though you can make no medium for this light, 
and no conductor for this lightning, of a phrase. Is it 
all in the Bible ? As well say the electricity of Nature 
is collected in a Leyden jar, that coined money has 
exhausted the mines of Nevada, or some cabinet con- 
tains all the jewels of God. 

Spiritual questions must be open, secondly, because 
of honest difference of belief, — open between diverse 
persons as in every single mind. Attempts to force 
conformity on the ground of the unity of truth imply 
our possession of it, delinquency in whoever rejects 
our results, and the right to inflict penalties for dis- 
agreement as a crime. Shall there be for the iniquity 
of intolerance no punishment? The inquisitor shall 
come to question at last. Sure as God ordains sin- 
cerity of manifold conclusions, the hierarchs will reach 
a sore pass when the blood of heretics shall call for 
judgment after long crying. From prisons under- 
ground, and tombs they were walled into, above it 
they shall ascend as shapes of prophets, for sentence 
not from the oppressor's but the victim's mouth. Some- 
time I shall exercise the right you deny. Resurrection 
of the body ! A poor boon God grant I may be spared ! 
The rising shall be of the soul in every faculty, and of 
that best of its parts, free inquiry. The questions 
choked off and strangled, hushed with the voices that 
put them, shall return with imperial dignity of divine 
permission and a prerogative of eternal satisfaction ; 
and " what we know not now we shall know here- 

2 



1 8 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

after," though other, greater things to be known, sus- 
pected and half seen, tempt and beckon us on. It 
will af)pear that Thought did not perish on a cross, 
and Freedom was not choked on a scaffold, and 
Humanity was not beheaded with a sword ; that of 
many notes God made the music false pretenders to 
his confidence branded as discord ; and that heaven 
is no monotony, but, like an earthly performer's, the 
great Harmonizer's skill is measured by the reach of 
keys he can command. 

The third reason for keeping questions open is room 
for growth. A small plant is put in a large pot for 
that spread of the roots which will support the spread 
of the boughs : and truths are living things that have 
no fixed or final shape and never get their growth. 
They stop only when turned to timber and lumber of 
creeds. If we must have sharply cut opinions to 
make a house, let us, like tasteful builders, leave green 
groves of thrifty speculation round our dogmatic pre- 
cincts. Fell not the whole forest : spare branches of 
beauty, and boundless woods of mystery. Reduce 
not this marvellous universe to pure intellectual prop- 
erty, but let wonder and worship have wild and tan- 
gled wildernesses to rove in. The Cape-Ann farmer, 
to win a few more acres of tillage, laid low the pine- 
trees that girdled his land from the sea, and found too 
late that the zone of grace w^as a belt of strength. The 
north-east winds and waves — avenging furies against 
making merchandise of Nature — blew the sands in 
long hillocks for the burial of his whole estate. What 
but deeper selfishness, exposing to direr retribution, is 
it to convert truth to a title-deed of salvation and ticket 



OPEN QUESTIONS. . I9 

to a celestial seat. Truth is a thing to adore, to live 
and die for ; and, if it will not rescue, rejoice it counts 
' us worthy in its cause to be cast awa3^ But its ser- 
vice is our privilege, and no sacrifice. Nobody ever 
gave to it so much as it returned. You may survey 
j its field, run the bounds of your persuasions, limit 
I your inquiries, and stereotype your prayers, when you 
i have measured the cords and stakes of the Lord's pa- 
' vilion. Not an idea but should be ever aggrandized, 
; most of all your idea of the Divinity. An unchangeable 
God ? He should change continually in that greater 
revelation which is your growing up to him, as Nature 
changes to the learner, as Niagara to the gazer, as 
your friend changes to your better appreciation, as 
you change with all aspiration and culture, as the 
horizon changes while you mount. " Beauty fled from 
the eye," writes Renan of Palestine, " through the 
gorges of the hills." So of divine beauty we follow 
the flight. 

But some things are sealed. Whether a man shall 
love his wife, or a woman her husband, is not an open 
question. Some clergymen will not exact, nor some 
brides and bridegrooms make the promise to love, on 
the ground that love is not in a person's own power. 
The noble religions of all ages are under a mistake ! 
Judaism and Christianity falsely meet in the first 
cominandment of the love of God, and the second, to 
" love our neighbor as ourself," was but an additional 
mockery from the Master's lips ; and as all the law 
I and the prophets hang on these, the whole fabric of 
worship and morals must give w^ay, and tumble in 
ruin tor the sophistry of sense. This is called affinity. 



\^ 



20 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

It is chemistry indeed, above its scope of senseless i 
atoms, in the vital sphere. In Goethe's story of Elec-l 
tive Affinities, v^ith whatever licentious implications, :; 
death is preferred to sin. It was left for later teachers 
to deny that love is a duty, and baptize inclination 
with sanctity, on the pretence that the affections suf- 
fer no control. Such immorality prepense' is worse 
than yielding to sudden temptation. What libertine 
wants a better apotheosis ! Many a man, not of the 
Mormons, has any number of free loves in a shifting 
polygamy, without Solomon's or Brigham Young's 
responsibility. The foundations of marriage are an 
open question, but not any husband's or wife's fidelity. 
It is time for the policeman if it be. Whether I shall 
love my wife or my wife me a subject of discussion } 
The man that hesitates is adulterous, the woman that 
deliberates is lost. Love at my option ? Love is a 
law. Am I at liberty not to love God ? I am no m.ore 
bound to love my Maker than my partner or child. 
Love is free as a planet not to leave its orbit ; and 
the Free Love that refuses the gravitation of order 
is a crime and a curse, retain what male or female 
pleader it will. Alas ! that woman should advocate 
looseness, — woman that has been, more than man, the 
victim of changing fancy, and w^ould find in larger 
independence no emancipation for her sex, but the 
aggravation of its woes. But note the fundamental 
mistake of this doctrine of easy divorce. It is the 
delusion that the object of marriage is pleasure, the 
common-place question being if one party is going to 
make the other happy ; and, if either fails, the missed 
joy may be sought elsewhere. But the design of no 



OPEN QUESTIONS. 21 

relation of life is gratification, otherwise than by abne- 
gation. Government, religion, society, is discipline as 
well as comfort : the wedded state is the same ; and 
whosoever seeks in it a paradise of satisfied wishes 
will be turned out of Eden with a flaming sword, like 
Adam and Eve. Love cannot be quite housed or 
fenced in. But true affection without or under the 
roof is no roving, but a requirement ; and he who 
imagines his regards may be flung round as a prince 
scatters coin among a crowd makes them a beggarly 
thing, and squanders the treasury of the King. Every 
farthing of sentiment in my soul is his property : I 
am but in trust, and must answer for each item of 
expenditure and atom of waste. Yet how the flood- 
gates of indulgence swing ! It is time to arouse to an 
[assailant more than robbers threatening the common 
weal : against the deluge of w^ild propensity, bulwarks 
and breakwaters of principle are more important than 
dykes at the inrush of seas, or props for crumbling 
bills. Consult the common list of crimes. Whence the 
murders and- suicides that make the daily sheet ghastly, 
Dut from inordinate desires? Whence the sympathy 
br the criminal, which Dr. Wayland said forgets the 
/ictim, but from overlooking obligations as essential 
o progress as the ties of a railway ; till murderers, of 
nther sex, are recommended to the mercy they never 
howed, as if justice were not kindness to all men, and 
mfair or unadministered laws cruelty. Dreadful as 
s capital punishment, as yet the shadow of the gal- 
ows must remain. Hang a woman ? Yes : that is 
me of the privileges she shares in the new age with 
aan, if she be unsafe alive. 



22 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

For free preach lawful love ! None other in the 
universe has title. God's love is his law : he has no 
liberty or right, such as Calvinism would give him, tq 
hate or forsake his children, nor allows their licens 
to leave each other. We are under bonds, and shal 
have no bail. If you cannot promise to love, do no 
wed. If I am priest, I give notice I shall exact the 
vow, which one good woman insisted I should make 
on her part also to obey. Be married with a ring, if 
its gold circle be any wise an added link. An absent 
husband lost his ring, which he said he would rather 
go home without his finger than not find. Is it on 
your finger in vain? Love is a good ship, freighted 
with human welfare : send her not out with sails and 
streamers only on this stormier than Atlantic sea of 
our mortal life, but with cables of principle and rud- 
der of a righteous will. Care for the coming race ! 
If married people may, for selfish delight, violate their 
pledge, what is the lesson to the young, whose warmer 
passion has no legal block? Hold to your covenant 
for the sake of your kind. Of liberty we have for the 
present heard about enough. The dose will last !: 
Tell us of loyalty now. Bismarck to the politicians! 
said, " Is it not well first to ask of our duties ? " when 
they tired him with talking about their rights. We 
hear the French are strict with the young, but permit 
the yoked to do as they list. Well, these latitudina- 
rians in America had better emigrate to the city whose 
majority is said to be of illegitimate birth. Relaxed 
authority is our ailment. All our relations are lightly 
worn. Judas, though single and cut oft' by suicide, 
has left a numerous tribe ; and the circle in Dante's 



OPEN QUESTIONS. 23 

hell for traitors must be enlarged. I have lived 
through two generations to doubt if that one old sin 
is less common, — desertion ; and to thank those who 
did not abandon me. Time, that tries all things, is 
for our friendships what a sieve ! There is the marble 
sculptor, carving epitaphs at the corner of the street ; 
but every one of us has a business large as his in 
our heart. Well, if an image of the resurrection be 
formed by the inward chisel ! Happy, if the true- 
hearted exceed those who have failed ! Let it be no 
open question if you are such. Let your constancy 
outlast any stamp on the document. 

Whether to assume the holy estate of matrimony is 
a question kept open by too many in our land, perhaps 
by the at present agitated relations of men and women 
held in abeyance or suspense. But whether to dis- 
charge its offices, to meditate an escape from its rela- 
tions, to have illicit intercourse, or, with what has been 
called anatomical purity, cleave in imagination to a 
coveted mate not your own, is not open to any soul. 

Confound not open questions with closed. Eccle- 
siastical or political tyranny, like a retreating host, 
makes successive stands, as Lee at Gettysburg fought 
and ran by turns. But the categorical imperative of 
Duty holds its own. What engagement to enter into 
is open, but not whether it shall be kept; while to 
some obligations we are born. It is getting to be 
settled that mankind is one community, and a man may 
choose his country with no arm of iron despotism to 
reach across the sea, impress him into a ship or reclaim 
yhim to war for his native soil ; but it does not remain 
for him to say whether he will be a good citizen of 



24 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

the republic in which he stays. The secessionist was 
doomed already, at Sumter as much as at Richmond, 
in declaring in Liberty's name his -withdrawal. My 
friend yonder, the monarchist in New England, has 
but this alternative, — to emigrate, or be a cipher where 
he lives ; while the revolutionist opens the question of 
government not in orderly debate, but appealing to 
force. But "the blood-red blossom of war" is a cen- 
tury-plant not considered in regular culture. 

The administration, democratic or republican, is 
open to question and suspicion, if it hide from criti- 
cism and hush up abuse. Power tends to corruption, 
needs watching and calling to account ; for party is 
partiality, to be mistrusted if it cry out when its doings 
are looked into ; and all New York politicians want 
is secrecy for tracks of fraud whose uncovering as- 
tounds the land. Why is politics a name for unclean- 
ness^ but because every set of men in place become 
thieves, if some opposition stand not guard ? O official, 
are you afraid } Then formidable is your foe. Why 
startled at any raid, but that something in your plat- 
form or proceeding — jobs, commissions, corporations, 
long and costly sessions — will not bear examination, 
and you cannot, as will every upright man, welcome 
unfriendly search.? One thing pacifies hostility and 
disarms hate, — a record without spot. Put on the 
Dread-nought of principle ! Flank your enemy by 
evolution of character : spike with patriotism his guns. 
But he is a dangerous man ! What makes him dan- 
gerous, if you are right? Will the people of the 
commonwealth or nation indorse and exalt a destruc- 
tive, in hopes at his hands of a division of goods, a 



OPEN QUESTIONS. 2^ 

confounding of the worth and wages of manual and 

mental labor, and partition of property like a pie cut 

into equal pieces for all round the board ? Incredible 

such a ground of popularity in this country. Unjust to 

the common folk your alarm. Universal suffrage be- 

I comes a wiser instrument and safer test every year, 

with each exercise making us rejoice we are not ruled 

I by sceptre or rank. I fear, says the conservative. 

iYour fear is no argument! I have not learned, said 

a statesman, to put my hand into the Treasury. You 

I are in it yourself, was the reply ; and that man a 

whole generation of voting has not dislodged. 

Conflict means something. Rival partisans use 
strong words. I know not what that Hebrew states- 
man, David, had encountered of objection to his reign, 
I when he prayed God to hide him in his pavilion from 
j the strife of tongues ; but any one who looks over re- 
cent files of the New York and Massachusetts press will 
understand what a strain for vile epithets the diction- 
ary has endured, and how the English vocabulary has 
been milked to the strippings for gall. Men balk not 
to call each other liars, thieves, devils ; and the charges 
are taken quietly, no suits for libel instituted, till one 
might think the depravity total, virtue quite gone, and 
all the self-called patriots plunderers and office-seekers 
alike. But the vilipending must be taken with a 
grain of salt ; and doubtless that proverb, " The devil 
is not so black as he is painted," arose from extravagant 
abuse of not wholly base men. But remembering who 
has by enraged adversaries been called devil and dia- 
bolical, from Jesus down, one may query if it be of 
course so dishonorable a term. Beside, Satan is a use- 



26 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

ful person : the Old Register informs us, in the case of 
Job, the Lord put him to excellent purpose to try and 
sanctify his servant and carry him from the temptations 
of earthly prosperity through the hell of disgrace and 
pain into a heaven of purity and peace beyond his first ! 
estate. Through a like needed Purgatory, by that par- 
ticular individual you consider your Beelzebub, you 
may be led. If any set of men in public life pass 
muster with such an antagonist, and come out of the 
mangle with clean hands, and no indelible stains, the 
agent will deserve something else than utter condemna- 
tion and scorn. Will it wash? you ask, of the dry 
goods. Some things very hard ! In Dante's Inferno 
one class of demons handles for others the penal fires, 
plunging them with forks into the lake of burning 
pitch. Set a rogue to catch a rogue. One political 
hand must wash the other : the Ins and the Outs are 
the two hands, and purifiers must be respected as well 
as saints. 

Is it an open question whether women shall vote ? 
Not quite, as they already do so in benevolent societies, 
church-meetings, and educational enterprises, it only 
remaining to complete their claim in civil affairs ; and 
at every caucus and convention the favor of the grow- 
ing number asserting it is put up at auction, time only 
being requisite to decide what party will make the 
highest bid. Without dogmatism in the case, or pre- 
judgment of the issue, the defenders of woman's right 
may ask a better argument against it than that of expe- 
diency, and alarm that more Irish women than Anglo- 
Saxon would rush to the polls. Nay, considering how 
on the ballot our destinies hang, and over what filthy 



OPEN QUESTIONS. 27 

floors we tread with our fate in our grasp, should we 
not anticipate the plea that women must be dragged in 
the dirt to the shrine where law and justice are to be 
sacrificed or saved, by substituting for ward-rooms and 
dens noble buildings as the suffrage-deposit, making 
palaces of our polls? If it be a true figure to speak 
of the temple of our liberties, there is no cathedral 
more solemn or fit for worship than the place where 
they are to be maintained. 



II. 

INDIVIDUALISM. 

WHAT curious imputation of human contrivance 
to God was the old notion of his scheme of 
salvation, in which, like the bits of paper we try to 
make a rectangle of, all the verses of the Bible were \ 
parts of the puzzle. A little larger word is used when 
liberal believers talk of the Christian system. But that, 
too, implies a fence Jesus never put up. A man does 
not accomplish much under keepers ; and no great 
thing was ever said or done in sight of limits, or within 
bounds other than of thought itself. By what pre- 
scribed rule did Raphael make that Dresden Madonna, 
the child in whose arms is King of men ? After what 
photograph did Michael Angelo, in the Sistine Chapel, 
copy that creation of Eve it takes the breath away to 
look at, and of which one said he did not see how 
the Florentine artist could have been descended from 
that first woman, the mother of all, whom he himself 
conceived ? 

There are in art or nature no walls. The autumnal 
maple I saw all alone in the field, a flame of fire from 
the bottom to the top, was the very burning-bush 
Moses saw, and it shone all the way to and from 

t 



INDIVIDUALISM. 



29 



Egypt while I looked. When the love of God visits 
Ime with its glow, there are no longer chambers in my 
'heart, but space for all mankind. I have seen people 
scowl at finding strangers in their seats in church, and 
have heard of nails driven in the railing to indicate to 
the sexton none but members of the proprietor's house 
should be admitted. But doors are leaving desk and 
pew, as Father Taylor said his pulpit had none ; and 
the street crowds into the slips of temple and theatre 
for sermons and prayers, without money or price. 
(Broad Church and Low Church supersede High 
jChurch. Faith is genuine as it is generous. Make 
a dogma or tenet of it, and it is lost. I find, said my 
friend, the more I reason about immortality, the less I 
|believe it. Throw yourself on your instinct, trust your 
vision, give your life to your Author and race, and you 
[will not doubt. The sceptics about God and heaven, 
however polite and complaisant, will be found in the 
last analysis self-seekers, and no devotees of their kind. 
Does one withdraw from you and enact the disloyal 
friend, you will find he lives on the surface, and de- 
grades all realities into problems. Not himself one 
with God, what wonder his very adhesiveness should 
be untempered mortar, soft solder for solid support. 
Say to him, All the distance between us you make : I 
but keep on the line, trying to reach you if I can. 
I^reedom of thought and freedom of fellowship are 
the same. What blunder identifies free-thinking with 
infidelity, when it is the only path by which conviction 
ever visited the human soul ? The time is at hand for 
»those branded as unbelievers to be counted warmer 
jvotaries of truth than popes and cardinals and priests. 



30 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

It is true, in all common interests, from a handful of 
men to the millions of a nation, we must co-act, and 
have organizers as well as idealists. Yet all institutions 
must be mended by the thought they spring from, or 
abolished by a better thought. But to change an or- 
ganic habit is hard, and attended with agonies that 
threaten dissolution. The reformer is always miner ; 
though Church and State have by civil and religious 
doctors been ruined so many times, still to thrive, as do 
trees once felled, out of their mangled or rotting stumps, 
that all croaking sounds like that of the ravens sent 
with food to Elijah. Our Constitution will get aground 
often, said an old statesman, but there will be always 
somebody, like the man on the banks of the Missis- 
sippi, who pushes the raft from the shore. Caesar in 
power may well complain that " Cassius thinks too 
much ; " but the thinker is saviour. What slow and 
cumbrous processes men use at first ! Self-interest of 
operatives, whose livelihood depends on present meth- 
ods, resists improvement. But a thought from some 
brain, mightier than an army, steps softly in, and the 
old style gives place to a new, though the light of 
burning mills leads the inventor, showing where past 
discovery made its way. The announcers of principle 
give the oil of life to the lamp that illuminates ; and, 
like the captain feeding the boiler with his freight, 
throw their flesh and bones into the fire that warms 
and impels mankind. We suspect the seer, and despise 
visionaries as unpractical. But there is not a comfort 
in our house, article of food or clothing, harvest of the 
field or preparation of the kitchen, grain of wheat for 
the grist or of powder for grinding the foe, but is at 



INDIVIDUALISM. 7.1 

first the pure potentiality they perceived and contrived 
I and combined. A man — Erastus B. Bigelow — is still 
I alive, to w^hose wit the factories in Massachusetts owe 
a debt exceeding a thousand-fold the sum he received. 
What is a railway but an embodiment of conceptions, 
once non-existent outside the solitary heads they visited, 
putting on a wood and iron dress to walk abroad in. 
Yankee notions alter the world. All imperfection 
comes from want of thorough thought. When that 
stops or lags, and the mind's eye winks at faults or 
defects in the machinery or manipulation, injury ensues. 
Intellectual blindness hurts and slays more than any 
ill intent. Peering into the wreck of the late disaster 
on the road, what do we see ? That a true time-table, 
making no noise ; a telegram, sped in an instant; the 
silent step of a watchman sent back ; an understanding 
between conductors, — would have kept above the sod 
a precious score now under it ; that if kerosene is not 
safe in a quiet parlor, it is dangerous in a jolting car ; 
that a good supply of rolling stock for emergencies 
might hinder the confusion of arrangement, ending in 
the chaos of destruction. But alas ! all these thoughts 
came too late. Because they were tardy, the trains 
were ! As I looked at the heap of burnt and battered 
bits of iron near the station, rusting in the rain, all 
that from the catastrophe the flames had left, I shud- 
dered to think by how little reflection that melancholy 
monument, lying so still a reminder of anguish untold, 
might have been spared. 

But what application have such illustrations to the 
working and apparatus of forms and creeds? There 
is no peril in the running of a denominational estab- 



32 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

lishment. No matter what a man thinks in religion, 
only how he lives ! Men are praised who never attack 
sects they do not belong to ; and if they cannot speak 
well of others, say nothing at all. We must answer, 
the spiritual exceeds the utilitarian importance of 
thought, in proportion as moral culture is of more 
moment than a patent reaper, mowing-machine, steam- 
engine, or cotton-gin ; for these are all but the mind's 
servants, serving it ill if it have unworthy aims. Is 
the telegraph a blessing when fraud or tyranny controls 
the wires, and they terminate in Napoleon's ante-cham- 
ber? Is travelling unmixed good? Half of us were 
better at home ! Where are you in your worship ? 
Whither drawn by the locomotive of will ? What sort 
of engineer is your conscience ? What is the latitude 
and longitude of your course toward the angelic isles ? 
y The disciples left all and followed Jesus. It was a 
splendid speculation. To be shrewd operators, we 
might be content to part with our lands and bonds, 
and take neither purse nor scrip, for one degree of 
progress and character, or surer beholding of our end. 
There are opinions on these matters we are wronged 
and put back by. 

Take some examples. The- Lord's Supper as a line 
between sinners and saints is no harmless ceremony, 
but a snare of hypocrisy, a trap of pretence, or a reef 
which thousands taking for a harbor have been cast 
away on. A profession of religion hinders practice. 
A certain prophet foretold that removing the land- 
mark between church and congregation, and seal- 
ing up the book of communicants, would destroy 
Liberal Christianity, though Paul said eating would 



INDIVIDUALISM. 33 

not make us better, or abstaining worse. His predic- 
tion failed. 

Regarding the Bible as so much dried pemmican, 
a little of which every day is a sufficient ration for the 
soul, classifies chaff and wheat, with some poison, to- 
gether. Who reads the Book through now and holds 
all the parts of Hebrew literature from a hundred pens 
of equal worth, save such as the old Bibliolatry still 
besots ? Is it pious or blasphemous to put Deuteronomy 
with the Gospels, David's curses with Christ's beati- 
tudes, or Jewish retaliation with the Sermon on the 
Mount? A theory which constructs a gilded idol of 
the whole Scripture, to be multiplied by myriads as the 
sole condition of salvation, and be a pledge of security 
because it adorns the table or cumbers the shelf, is a 
bane. We have against it only the dishonest security 
of a quiet agreement to let Kings and Chronicles, 
wrathful prophecies and illogical epistles, go by de- 
fault while we attend to parables and psalms ; or else 
of an ingenious arguing of truth into the letter and 
falsehood out. But children and the simple, unable to 
understand this, are exposed to mischief still. It was 
said of a certain politician, He is all brass. But the 
prayer-book betrays a composition so like Nebuchad- 
nezzar's image, no wonder good churchmen can endure 
the contradiction no longer, but must have a purged 
liturgy, — as I remember Ephraim Peabody sought in 
vain to correct the comparatively pure version of the 
King's chapel, which an Englishman said was the old 
one watered, but my friend answered was the old one 
washed ; and needs washing a little more. 

What so absurd as a prayer for deliverance from 

3 



34 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

sudden death ! The article of death is always sudden ; 
and if the sentence deprecated is of death in the ful- 
ness of one's powers, is not that what everybody 
should crave? What is decline? All that is sad, or 
casts a shadow into the prospect of old age. How 
clear an image of blessed departure is Scott's from 
the set of the tropical sun ! 

" No pale gradations quench his raj." 

How many covet going at once rather than drag to the 
grave ! He that fell by lightning was held by the 
ancients — 

" Favored man by touch ethereal slain." 

James Otis wished and had such fate. Job begged 
not protracted existence, but hunted after the grave 
and wanted it to open at his feet. If the reader 
has not, the writer has seen many an hour when death, 
but that wisdom withheld it, would have been a boon. 
It pleases God to call many suddenly : why pray 
against his decree? Of one whose genius years do 
not dim, it was said, he will fall like a pine-tree, he 
will dry up and blow away, or creep into some nook ; 
he will not die, nor an}'^ man know his sepulchre. 
What better for Gannett, spinning out his last fibre, 
turning the wheel when no more wool was on the 
spindle, than Elijah's chariot of fire ? The version of 
the original form into " death unprepared for " scarce 
improves it. Not death, but life is the thing to pre- 
pare for. Why notice that which Christ abolished? 
The idea that God changes, turns his face from the 
sinner who passes unreconciled, takes beyond any 
profane swearing his name in vain. No repentance 



INDIVIDUALISM. 35 

or hope beyond the death-bed ? As the tree falleth it 
must lie ? The human soul is not a fallen tree ! The 
best repentance for the worst transgressor or most 
precious saint is after earthly decease, and Watts's 
line is true of neither, — 

"Fixed in an eternal state;" 

for it were a fine degradation of the future to annul 
there the law of progress which is the sole comfort 
here. 

Let such cases suffice to illustrate how thought may 
act as a solvent on the chronic prejudice of an invet- 
erate phrase. Is not more or better steam welcome? 

ye who run the machine of religion, hate not those 
who supply new motive power ; and let organizers 
suffer search into the basis of organization, as men are 
employed on the iron road with their clinking ham- 
mers to test the wheels. Not what excites, but incites 
us, is the point. Are you rid of ambitious incentive, 
of all desire to sound or shine, and sing Monckton 
Milnes' "Lay of the Humble".? Can you resign 
leadership and refuse following .f* Can you hold appe- 
tite from lusting and your tongue from reply .f^ Then 

1 care not for your theological name : your connection 
is with every worthy spirit to which the universe gives 
breath. 

Orthodoxy substitutes legality for love. God can* 
not remit his law of eternal perdition to the race for 
their ancestor's first offence ; Jesus pays the penalty 
with his blood, and the ransomed get into heaven on 
the ground of right in his merit with the Judge to 
whom he stands bail and pays the fine. Observe the 



v^ 



36 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

effect on character of this forensic view. Severe dea- 
cons and strict members of the church keep the letter 
at the expense of the spirit of their contract, carrying 
their divine scheme into human covenants, as Shak- 
speare makes Shylock quote Jacob's trick about the 
cattle to excuse his own greed. What signifies my 
neighbor's heading the list of communicants in good 
standing, if, as the standard of his proceeding, to the 
law of equity he prefers the law of the land ^ Why 
should he not.'* Why should he be liberal and humane, 
or just in the large sense of doing as he would be done 
by, when the God he worships is so sharp ? No : let 
him encroach, run out his lines against my light and 
air, return robbery for my bestowment, and, wherever 
he can, do the legal thing that is immoral and unchris- 
tian, and without breaking the statute take the lion's 
share ! He has no higher law. He is as good as a 
God on whoin his own children have no claims he 
is bound to respect, who forms one vessel to honor 
and another to dishonor. But, said my friend, God is 
not a potter. 

The critic of what is popular is asked what he 
proposes instead : it is a malefaction to give nothing, 
but only to take away. But as a decaying structure is 
mended piece-meal, as a living organism is perpetual 
substitution of particle for particle, so no system of 
opinion comes or goes by human will or at once, but 
by working through periods of a divine law, one of 
whose executors is every honest objector, and which 
Jesus fulfilled for his times not only by positive state- 
ment but by finding fault. The trellis a vine clam- 
bers on is not torn away ; but, if it be not repaired, 



INDIVIDUALISM. '37 

it will rot and the vine fall. Ever and anon a voice is 
lifted, We have had criticism enough : construction 
is in order now. I answer, The two must go together. 
Unitarianism fancies it is the last landing-place, the 
pillars of Hercules every voyager must stop at, though 
seas and continents of truth lie beyond. But the horned 
bull of Fanaticism is not slain yet. If the Rationalist 
has been the picador, the Radical must be the matadore 
in the unfinished fight. It is held dangerous to unset- 
tle a common faith. Not if it is unsettled by thought ! 
Better unsettle your house in season if it rest on the 
sand. Is it dangerous to disturb a bad style of build- 
ing, an uneven railway, or any defective machine .f* 
We do it that we may be safe. He is the very devil, 
said one of a Road President who was efKcient. Is 
security of less moment for the soul? What is salva- 
tion.? Not escape from hell, but entry of bliss. I 
will not carry my blame of an opinion into my treat- 
ment of the man. There is a Public Garden of Human- 
ity where all may meet : there is to be a Museum of 
Art and an atonement of Beauty. There is another 
Common than that within the iron fence. As Radical 
and Reactionist can enjoy a flower, a picture, or pros- 
pect together, so the universal Creator opens vistas 
either way of memory and hope, through which, des- 
pite side glances at their respective premises, they can 
gaze on destiny and glory together. 

For all the dogmatism is so stiff, it does not lie very 
deep. It is a crust, a clod, or hard pan under which, 
in everybody, we break into fertile soil. With theo- 
logic as with social gossips, what an automaton is the 
tongue ! How true the proverb of its being hung on 



38 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

wires ! What a perpetual motion is the repetition of 
a creed, whose articles to the Protestant are like the 
Catholic beads ; and how deceptive the voice they are 
proclaimed by, which crowds hang on for its resonance 
and animal heat, three-fourths of the ardor being of 
the body not the soul, and the speaker being only 
an additional stove or furnace in the house ! When I 
consider the nature of what my admiration is chal- 
lenged for, how the famous pulpit-orator may go to 
his audience with nothing to say, and with what seem- 
ing delight it is heard, the fervor seems a kind of 
insanity, such as populations and nations are touched 
with in some illusory expectation or aim, — like that 
French foolishness insisting the downfall of Paris was 
impossible, which, made into a compound battery for 
Victor Hugo to handle, did not avail against the 
German guns, though an English writer calls it the 
most vital vanity in the world. 

The congregation, you tell me, was great. Large it 
often is, and hundreds have to go away. But to what 
purpose ? There are huge gatherings at concerts and 
theatres and fire-works and menageries and jugglers' 
shows, and on the Exchange. Let me celebrate the 
thin house ! It may be a question whether, throughout 
the world's history, more has not been done with few 
present than with many. Two or three in sympathy 
were enough to persuade Christ's attendance. It is 
a strange fact that the performer's power often redu- 
plicates with the diminution of the throng. He 
becomes more natural and simple, ambition for effect 
dies, the inordinate stimulus that sometimes the actor 
is not inspired but maddened and prematurely killed 



INDIVIDUALISM. 39 

by Is withdrawn : the Spirit comes ; and, for a lunatic 
distracted with conceit of his importance, we have an 
organ of the Holy Ghost. What joy and upbuilding 
we remember in small companies, beyond superficial 
transport of crowds In the laughing gas of ecclesiastical 
vapor they breathe ! We search too much for God in 
the upper void. He Is under foot as well as overhead, 
in the hell of our privation as in the heaven of bliss, 
in my conscience and my friend's heart more than 
among the stars. The earth as well as the air is the 
Lord's : let us respect the earth in us of which he made 
us, as well as the soul he blew into our nostrils. O 
invalid, who hast spun thy brains into the web of thy 
fancy, the Divinity inhabits the world of fact. Become 
worldly-minded, a man of the world, as your neighbor 
is too much and you not enough. Pine no longer 
among thy theories. Leave thy pillar, touch the earth 
and arise strong. " Let your parish go," said Aber- 
i nethy to worn-out Dr. Tuckerman, " and build a barn." 
Moiling in the dust, striking on the ledge, blasting for 
a cellar, raising the house, I build up beside my dwell- 
ing my nervous system, and learn that the Deity I 
was soaring after had not left the ground. When I 
can live close to my mason and carpenter, abide near 
any human being without jar, I am with Him. Have 
your own way, you will live the longer, we say. Yes, 
when it is the King's highway of brotherly love. 

But let Freedom be understood. It is no indeter- 

mination, but thinking and acting according to law. 

America borrowed from France her political ideas. 

, But the old French triumvirate — Liberty, Equality, and 

iFraternity — have fallen out. Say the Communists, 



v^ 



40 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

• 

" We do not want liberty, but equality." Equality, like 
my friend's serpent that ate up the brother he was caged 
with, has devoured Liberty ; Fraternity will be but a 
side-dish in the same meal. Labor against capital is 
the form the new strife takes which is to have the next 
century for its battle-field ; and, among the passions 
that shall thunder, there will be need of thought. 
We may find no " glittering generality " or " blazing 
ubiquity," but a half-truth apt to false applications, in 
the doctrine of all men's equality by birth in any power 
or for any lot. There is no freedom but in order, 
harmony, the mutual adjustment of all according to 
their several abilit}'^ and worth. " The career open to 
talents," said Napoleon ; exercised, we must add, for 
the common weal. We learn from M. Coquerel that 
the late incendiarism in Paris arose from the insane 
principle of destroying capital, as though it were not 
a crib at which all men feed. In the Communists 
pulling down the column in the Place Vendome to 
signify the end of war among the peoples of the globe, 
by self-sacrifice of national glory to the idea of universal 
peace, there was something sublime ; and when they 
burned the guillotine before the statue of Voltaire, to 
symbolize the end of its red executions, society seemed 
growing more humane. But the enterprise of striking 
a level of human fortunes, Procrustes coming again to 
dock the long stature and stretch the short, will cause 
more woe with its brutal average than it will close. 
The crevice when it is opened, as Dr. Beecher said 
of the old Revolution, will run blood. Such inter- 
nationality will be no advance, but another fall of man 
to the savage state, and, by removing motive to toil, an 



I INDIVIDUALISM. 4I 

I exchange of riches for general poverty and want. The 
I excess of impulse in the last decade, which has shaken 
.either hemisphere more than earthquakes, needs reason 

to be its moderator, regulator, and safety-valve. 

We want to know not only what to do, but what 

not to do or say. Socrates says his Demon told him 
I where to stop. 

I ** As fools rush in where angels fear to tread," 

how often impertinent interference and superservice- 
jable suggestion make us wish that Demon might come 
!back ! Would the mediums that converse with Soc- 
rates be good enough to hint to the old philosopher 
:how we should thank him for sending into the world 
jonce more that useful governor of his mental machine ? 
At present, no benefactor could surpass this interior 
Iconscience, sitting secret, like Maelzel's automaton, and 
jat every false move in the game of human life saying, 
Check. " In four cases out of five," said a great physi- 
cian, " we help a patient best by doing nothing, and 
the chief rule is not to move or prescribe anywise with- 
jout surety of benefit." The doctors of our sick society 
jmight well heed the lesson. Said my medical adviser, 
]" The most I can do is to tell you how to keep out of 
[harm's way." Give nature a chance to rally ! He 
('that abounds in political specifics, and meddles most 
with human nature, is a worse quack than medical 
societies banish. So-called cure is the main generator 
jof disease. 

Our raging publicity overlooks the value of private 
» counsel. From some individual comes the saving 
Iword. It is always proscribed as individualism till it 



42 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

becomes the common sense. But the deliverer is the 
superior soul, communicant with the Supreme to con- 
vey its wisdom to half-unwilling recipients ; one that 
shares neither the panic of the multitude nor their 
zeal, but has a heart beating for his kind, and is in 
his opponents' citadel the friend of their own secret 
respect. 

" Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," 

wrote Wordsworth of Milton, from whom shone the 
beams of republican liberty brighter than Orion for all 
men. Of want of leaders, there is much talk ; and 
the leaders, when they come, are often but persons 
magnetized by some epidemic impression or prevailing 
superstition, like a certain captain who put himself 
at the head of an officerless regiment at Bull Run, 
and simply went with them to Washington in their 
rout. Our civil and religious commanders are men 
catching the contagion of any troop that marches by, 
intent on victory or retreat. The ducal power on the 
field is not in those who give the loud orders and ride 
in uniform, but in some unseen Moltke or silent Grant. 
So in faith and morals, not by the marshals and plat- 
form-orators, but thinkers we are led. Such let us 
cherish as the apple of our eye ; and not measure their 
merit by their power to push and multiply themselves 
in men's sight. Mr. Pierpont said of Dr. Channing, 
" Put him into the street to shift for himself and make 
his living, and he would die." But we knew his 
quality, and would no more have put him into the 
street than thrown out our mirror or spy-glass. Is 
physical strength — to work and lift, hoist or farm, fish 



INDIVIDUALISM. 43 

or build — the gauge of a man?- How with those that 
poise the telescope in the observatory, watch the cur- 
i;ents of air and sea, predict the storms and cyclones, 
make coast surveys, calculate eclipses, and run the 
lines of danger and refuge for ships on our maps and 
charts? "All things in common" was a shallow, tran- 
sient rule. Equalize tasks or goods when you can 
equalize gifts. We did not put Channing to the 
plough-handle, but to the pulpit and the pen. He 
did braver things than carry a musket to load and fire. 
It is not always the stalwart whom in the trial we 
can trust. The woman who, when the Life Boatmen 
were afraid, and refused to venture out to the wreck 
on the Irish shore, went alone in her little skiff and 
rescued the last survivor through the boiling surf, 
proved that something more than muscle is called for 
in the dreadful hour, and had a right to vote all those 
cravens down. 

A perfect development is, doubtless, not only the 
complete beauty of a human creature, but the condi- 
tion of the highest health of each particular faculty. I 
fancy my friend's metaphysical glance would not be 
dulled, but cleared, could he also keenly as an Indian 
follow the trail. As diamond cuts diamond, and one 
hone smooths a second, all the parts of intellect are 
whetstones to each other ; and genius, which is but the 
result of their mutual sharpening, is character too. 
He who is excellence, and does the heroic thing, will 
say it with equal however rude expression, as did 
Luther and John Brown. Said Gangoolly, the Hindoo 
convert to Christianity, " When I made up my mind, I 
went into my closet and cast down my idols, to break 



44 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

in fragments on the floor, with fear in one side of my 
heart, and triumph in the other." How many a pull 
at windlass and capstan that gesture was worth ! 

But, if we train not in a Denomination, do not 
attend the Conference, or subscribe the Compromise, 
we are charged with individualism. Is it so bad to 
consider truth or right no creature of a consociation or 
suffi-age of the majority, or level average of differing 
minds, but an act of duty from a perception of the 
mind? Sheridan was individual restoring his troops 
from panic on the Potomac ; Grant at Vicksburg, 
Sherman in Georgia, Washington at Valley Forge, and 
Butler in Baltimore and New Orleans. It is the fault 
the synod found with Jesus, the council with Stephen, 
the Jesuits with Pascal, the Church with Wycliffe and 
Huss, the Pope with Luther and Dollinger, the Uni- 
tarians with Parker ; and every sect with whoever 
presumes to know more than it has laid down. Were 
these men individual in the low sense? Is number 
virtue? How easy to outvote God who is only One ! 
If individualism be self-seeking, — like that of the 
profligate, glutton, miser, and sot, — shall we' charge 
with it those who sacrifice themselves and take up the 
excommunicating cross? We hear of people on the 
fence watching the signs of the times, to know which 
side to jump, to be, as the poor queen tells " Austria " in 
the play, " ever strong upon the stronger side." There 
is a theological fence. Popularity is never so sweet as 
among our associates in an unpopular body. Does it 
become such as enjoy to indict those who renounce it 
when conscience bids ? The accuser may be target of 
his own shaft. To be willing to appear on platforms 



I 



INDIVIDUALISM. 45 

and receive ecclesiastical invitations, and be praised by 

the religious press, and have one's own books printed 

by an association, Is no demonstration clear as Euclid 

of philanthropy. The hypocrite is no hermit. The 

humbug buzzes in a swarm. Your brother's pride of 

I separation may not match yours of communion ; and 

' in attempting his portrait you draw your own. " You 

, shall be a major-general," one was told, to tempt him 

I to join the convocation. Did ambition keep him away ? 

If he stood aloof for that luxury of thought, more sub- 

I tile than of appetite, to be a mental Sybarite, he might 

I be well arraigned. But what if better service were his 

aim? O brethren, the motives on either side may 

be deeper than party. At the siege of Paris a wounded 

j Uhlan and Frenchman, both reviving from swoon 

I together, recognized each his antagonist, exchanged 

I smiles and died, with that sign of something more 

than strife. Pure Individuality does not exist, only 

independent thought. 

Such men as Newton and Kepler are said to think 
God's thoughts after him. But what is the use of 
thinking? Do not all the churches undertake to do it 
for us ? Does not every creed assume that all the think- 
ing Is done ; and liberal leaders tell us all we have left 
us is to go to work, and spin our brains no more. The 
j more you think, said my friend, the more you are puz- 
zled : act on your impressions, or take the current views. 
Robert Burns says the poet does not find the muse by 
thinking long ; and Shakspeare shows us in Hamlet 
how over-fine reflection palsies the will. I answer, 
Thought Is deeper than logic, taking for Its laboratory 
both heart and head, and has a use to resolve every mis- 



46 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

take. Error is not pure falsehood : it has a mixture 
of truth. As a man choosing the wrong road is still 
in the world, and will come by some circuit to his goal ; 
as the ore has in it gold and silver as well as dross, so 
thought is the process to regain the track we have 
strayed from, and to smelt the crude mass of opin- 
ion. The English Bishop Colenso in Australia, 
eliminating blunders from the Pentateuch ; Father 
Hyacinthe in France and his colleague in Germany 
resisting the Pope's infallibility ; radical writers in 
America warning us against Biblical idolatry ; and 
scientific explorers all over the world scouting the 
superstitions of theology, — are but so many meters. 
Watch the motions of your own mind in successive 
years, your varying construction of articles, or empha- 
sis of miracles and prophecies and proof-texts ; and 
you will own how the slow, silent tide of reason 
sweeps away floating, superficial dogmas, and like the 
Atlantic surging into some muddy creek hides the old 
landmarks of belief. It is curious to see how this tenet 
and that, once made the seal of salvation, passes from 
the most orthodox pulpit and ceases. One spell upon 
the minds of men 

"Breaks never to unite again." 

Why and whence this inevitable disintegration? Be- 
cause Thought cannot seize the unthinkable : there are 
things the understanding cannot entertain any longer, 
more than lungs can respire in a vacuum. That a 
babe is born totally corrupt, that a favored few are 
chosen and the rest eternally doomed, that any child 
of God can be finally lost, that his innocent Son 



i 



INDIVIDUALISM. 47 

could be punished, — doctrines once unthinkingly pro- 
claimed, — are now impossible propositions ; not dis- 
carded from among the articles, but suffered to sleep, 
given the go-by, laid upon the table, because there is 
no chamber open to them in the human brain. They 
have gone, with witchcraft and the evil eye, and the 
power to curse, and demons, and priesthood, ^nd 
divine right of kings. 

Thought also resolves evil into good : this solvent so 
thorough, this reagent so mighty, that in its extreme 
application all natural and moral ill disappears. No 
annoyance or injury, no insult so gross, or harm so un- 
expected, no treachery of friend, ingratitude of those I 
forwarded, dislike of those I loved, but under this com- 
pound blow-pipe melts. Evil is a snow-flake to swell 
the current it seemed to resist. Be it great calamity 
or trifling wrong, its compensation is its food for 
thought. Riding in the cars through the north-east 
storm, at a way-station a man coolly takes my umbrella, 
leaving me to get home in the rain. What do in such 
a case? Cry, Stop thief! Run after him, as one said 
he would, though he had lost the train ? — sagely add- 
ing. It might end in the State-prison. But the man that 
has made so free with my property must need it more 
than I, and perhaps he agrees with the Frenchman, 
Proudhon, that all property is robbery, and he is only 
getting some of his own back. I can afford to buy a 
new one better than he : I shall never feel it in any 
inconvenience to my purse. Going away unmolested 
may stir in him some generous shame : by and by he 
may even want to return the utensil he has no right to. 
j That nicely carved handle may tingle in his fingers as 



. 4^ RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

he holds it over his head in some pelting shower, as 
conscience-money has burned in the pocket of many a 
robber, and been often sent back to this or that private 
fund or public treasury. Therefore, though I had 
grown fond of the umbrella, that had shielded me 
through many a beating storm or scorching sun all the- 
way from Massachusetts to the pine barrens of Florida, 
did I not get the full worth of it in these reflections ; 
and, though I never should have another, was not my 
revenge or atonement for its loss complete ? Let the 
thief reading understand I am paid ! 

Laugh at the trivial instance to illustrate a principle 
verified on the grandest scale : only try the experi- 
ment I Put your trouble into your thought, trace its 
relations, learn its object, discern its effect, and you 
get rid of it, — it is no trouble at all : it is transmuted 
into gold by the true philosopher's stone. So the 
Mohammedan mystic said, the religious soul is not 
that which submits or bears patiently^ but that which 
is not afflicted, — does not recognize harm. Per- 
fect love casts out not only fear, but sorrow. No mat- 
ter how great the grief may appear, — bereavement 
of nearest companion or dearest child, — thinking of 
its lesson, you become its master. Said a noble 
woman : " My anguish is mine : it is my fortune and 
possession ; I own it. You cannot have it : you may 
make your million of gold on the street ; but this is 
my inalienable treasure." It does not look so, more 
than a dark rock in the mines of Nevada looks like 
the silver pouring from it in the furnace heat. Yet 
you can lose nothing but thought doubles its worth. 
Yonder is the grave. But there is a deeper grave 



INDIVIDUALISM. 49 

within. Its walls and fences are the boundaries of 
your own heart. Nobody knows the way to the gate 
of it but you. In it are buried no useless corses, but 
old friendships and associations ; sentiments once mu- 
tual betwixt you and others, that no longer exist, — 

" Fond desires and hopes as vain." 

The obsequies were noiseless, without shroud or coffin 
or funeral procession ; yet no crape ever worn, no 
lament over the dead ever lifted, no hollow sound of 
the gravel dropping from the sexton's spade, could 
signify such suffering as went with the interments in 
that invisible sepulchre. Yet what man or woman 
whose thought has not from these terrible sacrifices 
of the seed-corn of human joy reaped a harvest .^^ 
There are resurrections from this other cemetery as 
well as from the ashes in God's acre. 

" There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking 
makes it so," says Hamlet. Does not deeper thinking 
make every thing good ? Does one show ill-temper ? 
Do not let your ill-temper match his. The worst sea 
is where two cross-waves meet. Try to understand 
it ; grapple it with your thought ; put it into the 
refrigerator of your philosophy, not the powder- 
magazine of 5'our passion, — and you will gather 
wisdom from it, as the naturalist does, not only from 
graceful forms, — skin or plumage, of beast or bird ; 
but from wasps and serpents, in his cabinet or 
museum. If our associates will be hard and unrea- 
sonable with us, will display bad qualities as well as 
good, while rejoicing in the latter, of the former it is 
quite just we should, with imperturbable attention, 



50 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

make curious specimens, — as my young friend, trav- 
ersing from Mount Desert to the Blue Hills, does of 
hornets and all manner of bugs. 

Perhaps our companion cannot wholly help his 
disposition more than the grovelling worm or stinging 
insect can : let this thought make us patient. Sin 
itself this potent element can reduce. Confess our 
transgressions and cry for mercy, yet we cannot help 
asking. Why are we constituted so peccable that not a 
soul escapes.? Calvinism makes but one exception, 
of the Son ; Romanism adding the immaculate purity 
of the Mother. " Shapen in iniquity," as David says, 
born and begotten so that we cannot avoid excesses 
and defects, what theory of such a fallible constitution 
can show the Creator just? Only this, — that sin and 
remorse enter into his plan of education to make us 
better and wiser, as Shakspeare says, " Best men 
are moulded out of faults." What but Peter's denial, 
Judas's betrayal, all the disciples' cowardice, made 
them the humble, resolute men they became? The 
worst of us can turn his vices to account. Sorely as 
we have offended, we can do nothing fatal. Sheer 
blasphemy and inhumanity in the old theology is the 
doctrine of a doom to perdition and eternal woe for 
personal or our ancestral delinquency. The bottom- 
less pit were a blot on Deity, though but one soul 
wallowed in it ! Every thread of disobedience, every 
fibre of depravity, God weaves into his whip to 
scourge us to virtue ; and how many find their luck in 
the offences by which they are lashed out of their 
indifference and sloth ! It was said of a certain hypo- 
crite, fancying he sported all the virtues in his behavior, 



INDIVIDUALISM. 5 1 

It would do him good to be mortified by getting 
drunk. Damned to all eternity for your wrong-doing.? 
What a monster you make of God with your conceit ! 
He does not reckon up the score of your departures 
and short-comings to present you with the bill at the 
judgment-day. He carries no ugly pack of your 
debts at his back. He has no memory : all is present 
to him. He has no conscience : that implies violation 
of law, which he is incapable of. He accepts the 
purity of your present mood. " Let by-gones be by- 
gones," he says. He will rake up no old quarrel. 
'' Now is the accepted time ; behold, now is the day 
of salvation." '' Though your sins be as scarlet, 
they shall be like snow ; though they be crimson, they 
shall be whiter than wool." We pray to him : does 
he not pray to us to turn to him.'* and may we not 
well abridge our loud shouts and long liturgies to 
listen while he so prays.? Evil has no existence to 
him. He to whom the night shineth as the day, and 
the darkness and the light are both alike, cannot look 
on sin, and is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. 
The measure of a man's character and elevation is his 
ratio of evil and good. If evil to him is large in 
proportion to good, he is bad and low ; if small, he is 
good and high ; if it vanishes, he is perfect like God. 

Thought, once more, resolves deformity into beauty. 
How much lacks grace ! How seldom we see a 
handsome person, with all the foils of ornament and 
advantages of dress, at a party or on the street ! To 
the vast majority flain is a mild term to apply. In 
the mental-photograph album, to the question, " What 
is your finest object in Nature?" one was uncivil 



52 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

enough to write, " A beautiful woman, though I have 
not seen one for years." But the artist chooses for his 
canvas not the faces commonly called beautiful, but 
those in which his keener eye detects expressions of 
sense and sensibility not revealed to a cursory glance ; 
and pretty people who have learned how pretty they 
are, and take attitudes and prink and trim before the 
glass, like the swans in the pond I saw at work on 
their feathers, he scorns as subjects. An eye which 
the genius of love makes penetrating will discover a 
charm in every face. Not a breathing man or woman 
but to insight will disclose more to attract than to 
repel. In the scarce-formed frame of the puniest 
child, what a wonder of fitness beyond the strongest 
engines and smoothest machines ! Physicians talk, 
not so absurdly as we conceive, of beautiful cases of 
disease ; for what we call the laws of disorder mani- 
fest the working of supreme wisdom and equity. 

Lastly, thought resolves seeming into being. What 
tries us more than separation or pain is illusion. We 
cannot grasp the universe. W^hat a kaleidoscope it is 
of shifting colors, or camera of dissolving views ! As 
I daily reach my door-step, I contemplate the beauty 
of the Brookline hills across the Back-Bay. I try a 
hundred times to seize and analyze the spell. It draws 
me back to gaze and muse, while the children stop 
their play to survey and smile at me as my hand 
lingers on the knob, and lifts not the latch of the door. 
I toil to take up the enchantment, and carry it away 
with me in my mind. But it baffles me : I cannot 
hold or tell what it is. 

A woman plays to me on her piano. The strings 



INDIVIDUALISM. 



53 



are so many tongues to tell me more of her experience 
than she would venture on with her tongue to do. I 
read or hear between the lines of sounding keys. I 
spell out trouble and triumph in the tunes. The ivory 
and ebony under her fingers speak of dark and bright 
experiences, of struggles with narrow circumstances, 
mixed with emotions of religious ecstasy. Her state 
of mind is a problem I cannot solve. Does her condi- 
tion prove human life the lot of justice, or gibe of fate ? 
A young girl sees the prospect open before her of all 
that is meant by wedded joy, and a long line of pos- 
terity flowing from her unspotted blood ; when, from 
his covert, the spectre glides in and dashes to the 
ground the cup just touching her lips. Was this bird 
of paradise made to be wounded, her bright wings 
ruffled, and every nerve tortured and torn ? We hear 
of the mirage in the desert cheating the parched trav- 
eller's eyes with the empty image of water to slake his 
thirst. This mirage of human life, tantalizing the 
soul ready to drink the happiness it craves and is con- 
stituted for, is the mockery. Not gall, like that offered 
to Jesus, is bitter : but the seeming of what we cannot 
realize ; and the old theology is lavish of gloomy fan- 
cies to paint the balking of desire : — 

"This world is but a fleeting show, 
For man's illusion given." 

" Each pleasure hath its poison too, 
And every sweet a snare." 

So it points to another world for reality, and counts 
apples of Sodom all the apparent hopes and deceitful 
satisfactions of this ; as if we could trust the note pay- 



54 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

able at a future time of one giving no evidence he is 
in funds now. Put aside, postponed, fobbed off in our 
vain expectations, writes one, with a grim comfort we 
anticipate death as something that will not dodge. 
But we want to touch bottom and feel something solid 
before. If we can catch nothing substantial here, 
what ground for supposing we shall hereafter ? The 
Oriental writers dilate on this illusory character of all 
terrestrial experience ; and what but this does Solomon 
the great king intend, when, after describing the burst- 
ing of all the magnificent preparations he had blown 
up for his delight, he puts, like a placard on the rock, 
this stern brand on the universe : " Vanity of vanities, 
all is vanity." Who that looks on the dance of blood 
and death performed by that most gay and wretched 
of nations, that took for its aim glory, and its name 
The beautiful 'Jra7ice^ yet tears down the monuments 
of its own fame, but must read a new commentary on 
the old text ? Shall we look to the men of physical 
science, the positive philosophers, for the relief from 
this phantom inspired sages fail to afford ? No, they 
answer : the reality of any thing we cannot reach. Only 
phenomena, the visible, ever-changing accidents of 
matter, can we know and arrange in order under law. 
God is unknowable : we can find nothing but it slips 
from comprehension, however plain to sense. " Is 
there no balm in Gilead? " no remedy for this distress 
of doubt } Yes : not in observation or regulation of 
facts, but in thought. 

" I think, therefore I am." Descartes meant this 
not for argument, but to say. Being is equivalent to 
thought, thought the indorsement of being ; a proposi- 



INDIVIDUALISM. 



55 



tion we cannot forget to repeat. " I am," said the dying 
minister, " therefore God, the Infinite Being, is." But 
He is, else how could 7 be ? I am because he thought 
of me. This is the solution of the riddle. What was 
the beginning of all, said Dr. Channing to me, but 
a thought? The thought of a family and home like 
the world is love. 

Here is the real, in your mind. You worship no 
outward object or image, but your thought. He is the 
thought of your thought. Beyond that you cannot go. 
Do you shrink from that, as a human measure of Deity.? 
What other measure have you ? The seaman might 
as well throw away his log because it cannot span the 
Atlantic, or his deep sea line because it can touch bot- 
tom only here and there, Cyrus Field refuse to lay 
the electric cable, or Herschel discard his diagrams 
because there are stars in the unbounded blue, — as 
we despise those faculties which are the only gauge we 
have. They are good far as they go, — counterpart of 
the creative soul. No illusion is this vision in the 
breast. Every pure thought is a glimpse of God. ^ 
We have seen him, though the sight fade the next 
moment for ever away. One beholding is pledge that 
to behold him we are made. Somehow the spirit in 
us, seeing and seen, ours and his, must be everlasting 
spectator of the eternal spectacle. In a life which has 
had its share of suffering, for one thing I am grateful, 
— the power and habit of thought. What a refuge, 
what an incentive, inspiration, and content ! No drug, 
or ether, or drowsy syrup like it to soothe anguish, 
lull misfortune like a crying child to sleep, and heal 
the stabs that are in every heart. Remembrance of 



56 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

your Maker, your Origin and Portion, is oblivion of 
every wound of earthly affection and all the scars 
of time. 

Such is the plea for individuality. Private sincerity 
is public welfare. A common Faith is a fortress we 
agree to defend, and have to desert. How many creeds 
once alive and swarming with champions resemble 
the mouldy castles on the Danube and the Rhine ! 
But our thought is an impregnable retreat. No sanc- 
tuary or city of refuge, no den or cover for the hunted 
beast, no tower the fugitive draws up his ladder into, 
is so safe. Mr. Hawthorne is said to have prevented 
interruption by a chamber without stairs. But in my 
mind I am not interruptible. The peace of God not 
only passes understanding, but also strife. Under cen- 
sure or insult, or the tiger-spring of hatred and revenge, 
the thinker, intangible, has meat to eat we know not 
of, a feast of wine and honey, while mockers hold to 
his lips the vinegar and gall. Hence his look of rap- 
ture you cannot understand. He has another lesson 
than the lecture you read him. Nobody, said one, ever 
told me what I tell. Be no gossip of men, but God's 
tale-bearer of news from heaven, like the prophet who 
imparts what he overliears ; for our breast is God's 
ante-chamber, and our instinct his door, whose handle 
we can turn any moment out of care ; and to the soul 
as to the eagle he has furnished an eyrie beyond range 
of earthly shot. 

But thought is practical. Under whatever condi- 
tions, it at last must decide. It breeds charit}'- by 
emancipating from individual bounds. Unreflecting 
parents expect from children as much love as they 



INDIVIDUALISM. 57 

give, forgetting that love descends ; and they cannot 
return to us, as we cannot to God, an equal love. 
When they have children, and we are dead, out of the 
mists of the grave, over the eternal horizon, will dawn 
on them the first vision of our old regard. We talk 
of justice to persons. We owe it to their thought. 
Are you well disposed to me ? — be fair to my thought, 
greater than I, ruling and using me for its servant and 
tool, which I stand for to live and die. It has right to 
be respected, while I have no claim, but as representa- 
tive of my constituent. I heard of an actor who had 
an idea of Hamlet by which he was governed on the 
stage, and of another altering his conception to suit 
purchasers ; and I heard of a preacher who had learned 
to imitate the New York, Philadelphia, and Boston 
pronunciation. But a true man never accommodates 
to a meridian a doctrine that owns the globe. He has 
not one opinion in his study or club, and another in 
his desk. He has no policy, but is impolitic for his 
thought. John Pierpont, being invited to a certain 
pulpit, if he would consent not to handle exciting 
themes, said, " No ! gentlemen, not if you would give 
me the salary of the Bishop of Durham ! " Unfaith- 
fulness is selfish contrivance. Thought instantly shows 
its folly ; and it detects the quality of evil without 
respect to the size of the act by which a weak judg- 
ment is confused, as if grand had an advantage over 
petty larceny. A burglar carries oft' a few silks, uten- 
sils, or jewels ; a pretended buyer secretes a bit of cloth 
under her cloak ; a pickpocket is found with your 
currency in his hand ; a small counterfeiter is caught ; 
a hungry woman steals meat from a stall, and is hauled 



58 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

before the judge. But millions of money are conveyed 
away by a Ring, and it is an " operation " ! Trust- 
property sweats, stock-jobbers strike for profits at stock- 
owners' risk, the bulls and bears toss and pull. Let 
us ask pardon of the beasts. No creature that scares 
you in the pasture, or hugs the traveller in California 
gorges or polar ice, is so cruel. We say the Bank 
suffers. But it is not alive. Granite walls, brick vaults, 
mahogany counters, and pigeon-holes have no heart 
or nerves, back to clothe or stomach to feed. They 
suffer, whose dividends are daily bread, education of 
children, cure of invalids. The widow suffers, whose 
husband can no longer defend his home from land- 
sharks, or sally forth to check financial moves against 
his estate ; and orphans suffer, who were advised as to 
the best investment of their little means. Religion 
suffers when Bible and prayer-book, sacrament and 
sermon, control human reflection so little they cannot 
hinder in the cultivated decorous classes transactions 
that have no advantage but enormity over old plunder 
on the London-surrounding highways, or Roman brig- 
andage still lurking in the plains of Lombardy or 
among the Southern spurs of the Alps. Custom and 
ceremony, civil and ecclesiastical, go on : public senti- 
ment is slow to improve, and the condemners are the 
committers of crime. But private thought proclaims 
the need of a sense of God not only in the temple and 
at the Lord's table, through stately ordinance, sweet in- 
cense, and sonorous intonation, — but in the merchant's 
counting-room and lawyer's office, on the judge's 
bench and at the brokers' board. When loss and 
death ensue from mismanagement, and directors are 



INDIVIDUALISM. 



59 



called to account, they feel offended and hurt. But 
what is the use of them if they do not direct^ more 
than does the ship's figure-head or the painted form 
with the printed Dirigo on a shield ? Stop your dis- 
pute how the wood and velvet shrine shall be illumi- 
nated. Take up your candles, carry them forth from 
every altar, and set them in the courts of Mammon, 
till all its dusky corners are lighted, and every un- 
righteous plot exposed. A lamp burning in a store is 
greater safeguard than a lock. " I want more light 
about the future," said my friend. We want it in all 
the purlieus of trade. Certain Italian thieves are said 
to have their fingers lengthened by the daily habit of 
searching the persons of their victims. There are long 
fingers nearer home ! Let us trust business is not so 
rotten, or greed so insane, as to make the revelation of 
iniquity a nine days' wonder, but that these greater 
robbers than the Alexander, whom the small thief he 
would 2^unish claimed fellowship with, may receive 
their due. 

Deeper private thinking alone can heal social dis- 
sembling. Reporting some interview, you say, I was 
on my good behavior and did it nicely. Not on your 
good behavior when the company went? You could 
curry favor, and let criticism crouch like a hushed 
dog, but change your face of compliment as your 
visitor turned the corner. The man whose tribunal is 
his thought is on good behavior when he is alone, 
and as careful of his designs as his words. His court- 
house is not the granite building. He stands at a bar 
whose rail is unseen. He knows nothing of great 
occasions and small. He cares no more to act than 



6o RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

to endure, to speak than to be dumb. Duty has no 
inequality. The spirit-level varies not for a special 
effort, more than mountains ruffle the huge sphere 
they are strewn on like sand. Pulpits and platforms 
sink ; chambers of pain and poverty rise. No rush 
of events and affairs can unpoise the soul whose collect 
is conscious truth. In the whirlpool is a centre the 
mad waters cannot shake. 

In an age of corporate agency, whose consolidated 
wealth challenges comparison with the exchequer of 
the State, and makes legislatures its tools, of nothing 
is the need so sore as independent testimony of the 
moral sense. It is no preposterous fancy, that for 
lack of vision the people perish. Let Argus with all 
his eyes come back, and permit no plan or proceeding 
to escape scrutiny. Away with darkness ! If secret 
societies continue for harmless ceremony, to gratify a 
love of mystery, or for mutual supply to the impover- 
ished from brotherly hands, let us have no Free- 
masons or Odd F'ellows of another sort to appropriate 
of the common riches more than their share. Let the 
manifold Rings that form and contract like anacondas 
in their destructive strength, to centralize power and 
wealth in a few, expand by ventilation till they burst ! 
One prerogative dignifies the human race, the freedom 
of thought, at whose assizes every practice must stand. 
In much we are excelled by the animals. The crane 
not only walks like me, but swims and flies as I 
cannot. But I can dive deeper, wade where it cannot 
follow, and soar higher. Without moving a muscle, 
the mind traverses Nature and has ascension without 
death. 



in. 

TRANSCENDENTALISM. 

'T^HE line of a planet is a compromise between two 
-*- forces, a resultant which students work out on 
the slate ; and social progress has for its factors the old 
institution and the new idea, from whose struggle the 
race shoots ahead, — one represented by the prophet, 
the other administered by the priest. Mankind de- 
pends on what it has hived and what it earns. Moral 
capital is no metaphor. Knowledge and virtue accu- 
mulate as well as silver and gold, and are the highest 
kind of real and personal estate, without which no 
business in politics or philanthropy could be done. 
How sad, said a foreigner, to think all the coined 
money in the United States could not pay the national 
debt ! Yes, answered a Yankee ; and to think, if the 
harvest failed all over the world for a year, all nations 
would starve ! Labor is the only source of wealth, 
cries the new party. But manual is not the only, 
hardest, or best labor. If we grew and applied no 
fresh ideas, all the words of prophets, biographies of 
saints, and traditions of Palestine would not stay our 
hunger, more than the granaries of Egypt or last year's 
load in store and barn. With all respect to those who 



62 RADICAL TROBLEMS. 

run the machine, a dearer honor belongs to such as 
supply the motive-power. Free and wild speculation, 
as well as custom and ordinance, has its place. Right 
as Leroux may be in the doctrine of human solidarity, 
or the advance of the species in column, the particles 
change in this huge body, as the ranks of an army in 
the field are depleted and filled up ; and civil or eccle- 
siastical continuity is no mechanical necessity, but that 
divine order we must put our own heart and will into, 
and which the boldest thinker or righteous iconoclast 
is no less part of than any bishop or sheriff', — nay, is 
leader of the van. Nature -proceeds not by leaps^ was 
the old Latin phrase. But closer scrutiny shows she 
does. There is not only expansion, but eruption, — 
volcano and earthquake ; and, in minuter spaces, signs 
of sudden action, as though the will of God were 
no figure of speech. Darwin and Spencer have to 
modify the doctrines of evolution and development 
to accommodate facts of rapid change into new orders 
observed by eyes sharp as their own. There is, said 
my friend, a track we must keep to in grooves of fate. 
But there is many a place where Nature switches off', 
and takes a new departure. The free-thinker long 
ago was said to have come to where was no more 
road. But his road has no end ; and he has advanced 
ever since, and still keeps on. The traveller in Switz- 
erland, looking from his carriage, beholds his path 
blocked at a hillside or plunging into a lake, and for 
the moment imagines in that direction is no further 
step. But, arriving at the point, he finds the beaten 
way winding round the mountain's spur into the rarest 
beauty of its course ; and the mind that goes on with- 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 63 

out terror comes to the reward of truth. Where will 
they stop ? is the inquiry respecting the critics of estab- 
lished methods ; and the answer is, Nowhere. M. 
Coquerel tells us he was scolded by the French 
authorities for treating social questions in his paper ; 
and, asking what was meant by social questions, was 
told, Thi7igs that are I Yet not a thing but must 
be unsettled in favor of something better, though the 
reason of the nickname Transcendentalist was, that 
whoever did this transcended all practical stability. 
Doubtless he who inhabits the region of pure thought 
becomes too impatient of existing modes. The air of 
the church is close and smoky, said one returning from 
a long sojourn in the country. Yes, I answered : to 
a person used to the whole atmosphere God makes 
so big that everybody may have enough, every room, 
however ventilated, will seem confined. But as we 
must be content to breathe in houses and temples, and 
shops and court-rooms, so we must live and morally 
respire in such establishment of Church and State as 
the common sense and conscience have been able to 
secure, enlarging and improving it as we can. The 
reformer is arraigned as destructive and traitor, accused 
of breaking the church-windows from the inside, and 
hewing down the pillars of the pulpit in which he 
stands. But if the windows are shut too tight to 
open, or stained with superstitious emblems, and if 
the sinking pulpit let him down to the level floor 
where his congregation sits, there may be a blessing 
from his axe and his stones. There is no church in 
Christendom where this question, whether some of the 
keepers are not betrayers of the citadel, does not arise. 



64 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

What free man in any communion is not charged with 
having broken his pledge, often unawares, as the ex- 
cellent Deacon Grant with some horror declared he 
had done, with the first mouthful of brandied mince- 
pie which his hostess had prepared. To think at all 
is violation of promise, in principle if not in fact, by 
marring some actual article of faith. How we queried 
whether those noble English Essayists ought to stay 
on the theological premises they took such liberty to 
alter and extend ! The papacy in Rome and every 
bishopric in America are shaken with the same issue 
of moral casuistry. Universalism and Unitarianism 
have expelled from their interior offenders they were 
griped by, with intolerable pain ; and what it is to be 
a true Radical I have heard the banished discuss with 
each other, as did the Southern seceders from the 
Union, albeit they have no home from which to drive 
the disloyal out. The interpreter and originator must 
quarrel, and organization be at odds with the unor- 
ganized or unorganizable : meantime, for benefit as 
for peace, it is well to have some estimate of the oflfice 
of the seer, and the value of his addition to the common 
stock. 

The crisis comes unawares. A new vision reforms 
all our knowledge, as the astronomer catches a planet 
in the threads on his glass and the solar system is 
readjusted. The world of shifting opinion hangs on 
a hair. How little it was thought, forty years ago, 
that a Boston clergyman's difficulty with his people 
about the way to administer the Lord's SupjDer would 
be the string let yito the loose public sentiment to 
cause a new crystallization. I remember the horror 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 65 

with which a fellow-student announced to me the 
unbearable criticism of the ancient rite, and my wonder 
at anybody's being so much moved. But forms hold 
fast after the ideas have changed which were their 
source and support, as shells and husks are no less 
tough and hard when the kernel and substance are 
gone. So how to eat the bread and drink the wine, 
or commune without eating or drinking, was another 
question added to the many which have made the 
ordinance a very volcano of controversy, ever ready 
for fresh overflow ; though the Oriental custom seemed 
not much suited to the Western mind. The young 
minister was told privately to alter the style of the 
symbol as he judged right, but he doubted his fitness 
for such reconstruction ; and the discussion sufficed 
to separate sworn friends and unseat a genius soaring 
like Phaeton, whose freedom with an outward observ- 
ance was his mishandling the reins of the Sun. It had 
come to pass that, when men spoke of the elements, 
not truth or feeling, but the oven and vintage, were 
meant. In taking up, later, the line of this ceremony 
between church and congregation, where by no power 
it could be restored, we felt the force of this prejudice 
threatening an equally violent result. 

The personal distress of. all dislocation doubtless 
attended that severing of the clerical tie. But the 
portent was of new growth. There are moral pains 
of birth and struggle for life. The man was not 
important to the Church till he left it to become such 
a figure as to make his judges the world's benefactors. 
Now he stood for a thought. His divorce from 
preaching allowed marriage with an idea, till then 

5 



66 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

coyly courted, for an offspring of the best poetry and 
philosophy of the age. A shrewd suspicion of Ger- 
man inoculation flung at the movement the word 
Transcendental^ for a disgrace, which, as of all 
names of good and odious things, turned to fame. 

In truth, the out-break was nothing new under the 
sun. . The fount of the Nile is discovered, but not of 
this spiritual Arethusa. Whoever was of that club 
meeting in Concord and Boston must recall the 
fellowship so dear, the delight as of another revela- 
tion, the Qiiaker peace, with but a dream of seeds of 
revolution dropping through the quiet air. Edward 
Everett likened the doctrine to Virgil's thunderbolt, 
three parts empty air. Was it wind the new husband- 
men sowed? The whirlwind that was reaped was 
a boon. Yet most men did not dread, but laughed 
at the phenomenon as but moonshine or mirage. 
As well tell Columbus it was no new world he had 
reached when heaved in view the outlying island, one 
of a flock which now beat at our windows in the polit- 
ical storm. Previous explorers had sailed into the 
same latitudes of thought. The startling doctrine of 
the soul's sufficiency was no upstart or bastard, but 
a lawful line of ancient origin, in divers branches, 
Hebrew and Greek, — going back to Plato and Abra- 
ham, Lot and Seth, groves of Academus and Garden 
of Eden, before Bibles were. It was revived in the 
best words of Jesus and John and Paul. English 
translators dipped their buckets for it into the wisdom 
of the East. The Hindoo found himself a Yankee 
with no question of caste. The Christian Scriptures 
were paralleled from books of strange names in other 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 67 

tongues. The spring of wonder burst up in Teutonic 
soil, the same living water as in Indian bottles or 
Jewish jars. It filtered into the clear British sense. 
With astonishing virility the spiritual theory was 
propagated by Carlyle ; and as visionary a mystic 
as ever wandered on the banks of the Ganges ap- 
peared in William Blake. Orthodoxy became ideal 
with Coleridge's '' Aids to Reflection ; " Wordsworth 
put the same meaning into his odes, and Cousin 
arranged it in philosophic terms. Yet when it was 
proclaimed in its legitimate conclusions in the sanc- 
tuary of Liberal Christianity, it was greeted with a 
shriek, as though Cudworth or Berkeley or Spinoza 
had never lived. Religion, under a show of progress, 
had declined,. In too much logic, expression became 
the ebb of faith, till it reached low-water mark. 
Sectarian controversy brought down Trinitarian and 
Unitarian alike to the flats of a dry and barren doc- 
trinality ; and the high divine converse with which 
Puritan and Pilgrim began the Commonwealth gave 
place to a Babel of words. What splitting of particles, 
as described by Gibbon in the former age ; what ran- 
sacking of prophecies, what dispute of the authority 
of this and that passage, what weighing of jots and 
tittles in diamond scales ; instead of the grand war 
of ideas, what petty battles of texts ! Andover and 
Cambridge responded to each other with paper pop- 
guns, not with the noise of His water-spouts. Into 
this squabble the angel blew his trumpet to summon 
to the privilege of direct communication with the 
Infinite ; none so much surprised as the trumpeter 
at the ague-fit of anger and grief that ensued. He 



6S RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

felt in order, without break or fault in the natural 
evolution. He had occasion to avenge his re- 
jected sentiment in an address to the Graduating 
Class in the Cambridge Divinity School, which, like 
the last whirl of sticks of the savage's tinder-box, 
first struck fire. But what a dish to set before the 
King, that performance ! After the short breathings 
of the gentle prayer, which had in it no pronouns, 
and one said was no prayer at all, came the textless 
discourse, preserved for ever in its sweet pungency, 
while all the replies to it are forgot. It was no hornet 
or drone lighting on us, but the sting of a honey-bee 
guarding for us our own luxury. It was the return 
of the Holy Ghost with voice, not recognized among 
manifold opposing echoes so long listened to in its 
stead. But no rude, unwarrantable assault could 
have begot such fear as that golden-mouthed speech. 
It meant business, and laid out a stint of work. The 
dismissed preacher had not been hushed. If he could 
not have the pulpit's velvet cushion, he would take 
the Lyceum's pine desk ; and what a power he made 
the Lecture, is it not to be written in our chronicles.^ 
In his farewell sermon, in Hanover Street, he had 
said there were functions of the ministerial office he 
should rejoice to discharge wherever he might exist. 
For these his change of situation was a help. As 
the painter stands off from the canvas to mark the 
accuracy of his drawing, this man's absence from 
his chosen calling gave distance for a true perspec- 
tive, while he was doubly impressionable to com- 
pare another picture with the ecclesiastical. He had 
the advantage of a smooth temper. Perfect health 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 69 

Stood bondsman for his equanimity, and the cool flesh 
of a child was type of his unfevered mind. He never 
rested and was never restless ; his figure, the rifle- 
man's statue, — not stirring till the fatal shot. He 
means something in every sketch, it w^as said of Hunt ; 
and God filled this w^ord-painter with intention, his 
own or the Spirit's you could not tell. They were the 
same. But, called to defend what he had said, he 
could give no account but his order to think. The 
responsibility was none of his. So thought Francis 
Bacon was authority enough for that philosopher's 
page; and this man was under command. His 
thought was not in his hands : he was in the hands 
of his thought. Like all who wear not their heart 
in their sleeve, put on no robe of enthusiasm, and 
warm their audience with no stove of animal heat, 
he was charged with being cold. The critics did 
not look close enough. They could not feel the 
spiritual flame nor appreciate that baptism of fire the 
Baptist foretold : which to the senses is a cool com- 
bustion. A warm temperament would have disqual- 
ified him for his task. Temperance was his star. 
After so much vapor we wanted dry light. Fondness 
for persons runs into idolatry of institutions, and 
checks audacious words. Only his dispassionate, 
if not unimpassioned disposition could deal purely 
with his theme. It did not occur to him he was 
going to hurt anybody's feelings : no vision or proph- 
ecy had ever hurt his. A full-grown superstition 
standing in the way, how but by undervaluation of 
the past, — as memory, habit, or tradition, — could he 
throw his whole weight into his axe at the root of 



70 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

the tree? When his friend said, " Here are my facts, 
I cannot give up them," " Here are my ideas," was his 
reply. The facts were bad. He wanted them to be 
better : as Dr. Hedge, being told the facts were against 
him and were stubborn things, answered. So much 
the worse for the facts. What shall be said to reports 
of the telescope pointed to sky or sea ? We can but 
repeat them, as the captain below repeats the figures 
the mate on deck calls out to him from his quadrant 
lifted to the sun. Here was a finer glass turning to 
the heaven of truth over the sea of time ; and the 
observer's sentence was translation of his sight. In- 
terrogated, he could but recite what he had already 
said. When John Marshall's party-friends begged 
to know why he persisted in refusing to answer 
Albert Gallatin's speech, he at last said, Because 
it is unanswerable. So those who complained of 
and rejected could get no rejoinder to this lesson. 
He compelled his critics to become his quoters. Out 
of what root did blossoms of such genuine beauty 
and fragrance foil the cut-paper flowers of the creeds? 
The Divine Immediacy with man ! One day, before 
a keen eye, water rising to its own level in a tube 
made a ruin of the Roman aqueducts. So it was 
shown the river of God is not confined to Jewish 
conduits. We must have nearer access to it than 
that long old file of Hebrew Kings, Judges, and 
Prophets, magnificent as are their monumental words 
and refreshing as is the flood they convey. 

This seer's originality armed itself with a new style. 
The surprising fitness of trite terms in his use was a 
resurrection of the dictionary. The silence of a sage 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. ^l 

whets our eagerness to hear ; and this man's advantage 
was his superiority to ambition, his wiUingness to be 
still, his indifference whether he used his eye or ear, 
his avoidance of eloquence, — which Dr. Johnson calls 
exaggeration, — and preference of low to high-sounding 
words, like the modest artist who gives the whole 
character of an object in neutral tints or a charcoal 
sketch. Why be forward or loquacious? Truth will 
find its own way and organ, and make dumb Moses 
more persuasive than rhetorical and mellifluous Aaron. 
It was not the only possible mood, perhaps not the 
highest manner ; but it was his, and apt to the time. 
There came no prophet's burden or scream, but the 
voice of one careless of the fate of his person or prop- 
osition : trusting truth to the air and allowing it time 
to sink into the ear, not anxious to multiply himself, 
but to condense his message. He knew no method 
could avail but that of his own constitution. Incapable 
of feeling personal outrage or oppression, in good con- 
dition, content with the universe, as well fed as any of 
the children at the table, delicate in his taste, every 
pore informing him who was coming, and closing at 
rude approach, and every nerve an alarm-bell at any 
catechism, — neither seeking an audience nor itching 
to hear himself talk, he was quite unfit for an agitator 
or ecclesiastical demagogue. Yet his individuality 
kept him out of any class. He stood for humanity, 
and was one of the people. So his banishment from 
the Church on a technical ground and punctilio of form 
was as blessed ostracism as Dante's exile from Flor- 
ence. Those going without the camp bearing some 
reproach are always redeemers. Inside the heavens 



*J2 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

are but half seen. That imagination which is eye 
and atmosphere is hindered by walls. A fence fences 
out more than it fences in. I must be free as an Indian, 
he said ; for I want more liberty than that with which 
Christ has made me free. 

These were intrusive allusions but that my topic must 
be treated with circumstantial illustration. A hero 
he will not be of his own tale. This story should be 
told, before all cognizant of the particulars pass from 
the stage, to vindicate the transcendental position as no 
affront to history, but protest against a mortgage of 
the future. It has been described as a transitory affair, 
like a meteor that shoots and explodes, or a plant with- 
out product or healthy root. But, standing guard for 
progress does not disown the past. Sceptic no more 
than Orthodox cuts off from his antecedents. Our 
ancestors had not only their solutions, but their ques- 
tions too. They had sailed for new discovery, and 
swung uneasy at their moorings, with doubts suppressed 
by their situation or unripe for expression, — an in- 
heritance for their sons, and coming to a head in brains 
born of their own. All our present growth was in 
their soil. The oak forest, that springs up after the 
pine is burnt or cleared away, pre-existed as shrubs or 
germs, for a while overgrown and kept down. Always 
in generous doubts nobler convictions fasten and thrive. 
The finest trees on the grounds where I ramble have 
forced their way through the clefts of the rocks. 
Paul was all the time in Saul. With his pains to prove 
his untainted lineage, did it ever occur to him that not 
the contradiction but cause of his heresy lay in the 
religious purity of his blood? Gamaliel, be sure, had 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 



73 



his queries, however he managed for himself and his 
pupils, like many a preacher and Sunday-school 
teacher, to subdue them for the time. Dr. Beecher, 
accusing some members of the Massachusetts Conven- 
tion of Congregational Ministers of departing from 
the faith of the Fathers, w^as asked by Dr. Lowell if 
there were any members who adhered to the faith, 
and could only cough out, Yes, for substance I He 
also in an ordination-sermon hurled Paul's anathema at 
the Unitarians as preachers of another gospel, and 
bade them depart and not shoot their poisoned ar- 
rows behind. The Unitarians had their pay when 
Dr. Beecher was arraigned as a heretic before the 
Presbyterian synod. But were the Unitarians rebel- 
lious or degenerate children of their theological sires .? 
No : they maintained the Pilgrim line, were Puritans 
of the nineteenth century, striking for freedom to 
worship God. 

'« Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more ! " 

Transcendentalism did not foul its nest, or, as is 
continually charged, despise its mother ; but unfolded 
the faith implied in every act of the settlers of the land. 
It cast off naught precious in the old belief; but 
was a new vessel, a better Mayflower for the Truth's 
escape from her foes. It set us all afloat; but that 
may be better than to be all ashore. A church once 
floated off* to Nova Scotia from the British in Boston, 
and still lives. The essence of faith is advance. Like 
a political constitution, it provides for its own amend- 
ment. 

In the moving on of mankind, the way-marks differ 



74 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

at each turn of the road. It is the general direction we 
must look at, like a ship that tacks, or carriage wind- 
ing round the hill. Would we repeat our Fathers' case, 
the items of their life.? That were false imitation, 
mimicry, a poor copy of those great masters. The 
living likeness is to apply their principles to our con- 
dition. One star differs from another, but they all go 
one way. One boulder has not its neighbor's weight 
or size, but every scratch on the primitive rock follows 
the same line of the compass. The icebergs show 
every sort of shape and similitude, yet all drift to the 
South. Our reformers square not their theories to 
those of any former age, yet steadily with every step 
near the goal of the same millennium. Like the 
angel that came down to trouble the pool at certain 
seasons, this visitation of the Spirit is periodical. One 
said its return was like that of the seventeen-years 
locust. But it always betokens conflict. Byron 
describes the cannon-roar that broke in on the ball- 
room at Belgium's capital as mistaken for thunder or 
rattling of a car along the stony street ; but volley 
after volley came to prove its nature : and every stroke 
of religious genius claims kith and kin with prior 
ones, though fifty generations lie between. At the 
gates of hell. Sin convicts Satan as her offspring ; and 
all beneficence is born of goodness. The intellectual 
regenerator is never heady, but calm as he is warm. 
He is careful as a surveyor of his spirit-level. Of 
the re-creator none could tell if his temper were flame 
or phlegm. He struck no attitude, stood on no stage, 
had looked in no glass, was no oratoric gymnast, never 
strained nor sweat, rolled neckerchief in his hand, or 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 75 

wiped emotion from his brow, but had laid the robes 
aside and sang without singing-garlands. He was poet, 
but not laureate. His leaves were loose : he found them 
with difficulty ; and his only noticeable gesture was an 
emphatic look, which a famous lawyer, who thought it 
worth the entrance-fee, said was directed at nothing. 
But it indicated that the speaker's subject had in his 
ecstasy become an object of sight. He was of the 
family of prophets who first are, then see, and then 
say, — that being the order. In the old controversy, 
who were the circumcision and Abraham's children, 
Jesus decides for the patriarch's spirit against his 
blood ; and what bomb-proof occupant of an accredited 
church could vie with this teacher of Christianity with- 
out its name? It sisfnified execution when into the 
Spirit's hands was put this imaginative tool, polished 
with courtesy and taking from good humor the finest 
edge. The least acidity eats into the steel ; but the 
keenness of rebuke is its tenderness. 

Yet this genius was too high and subtile for popular 
effect. A university of education, doing more for 
scholars than any college, it needed the supplement 
of talent to spread its inspiration into the common 
school ; and that came in the stalwart figure — like 
a second Luther — of Theodore Parker. He made 
no feast for a few of nightingales' tongues, but a board 
w^th bread for millions. He was not a seer, but an 
officer, — the deputy-sheriff' of ideas. Never lived 
man more strong and faithful to execute the writ. 
Piety and philanthropy were as the coming and going 
of his breath. Like an old Hebrew, he turned every 
piece of paper to see if the name of God were on it ; 



76 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

and all his study went into act. He suffered no 
volume of truth to rest with uncut leaves on the shelf, 
no scrap of information to be thrown into the waste- 
basket. There were those well enough pleased to 
have the new speculations remain mental exercises, 
and let institutions alone. Parker tore down the par- 
tition of esoteric and exoteric as the veil of the temple 
was rent in twain. He could not conceive of a scholar 
keeping a bit of his learning from the people to him- 
self. He bitterly denounced the policy of doling out 
wisdom as the folk were thought able to bear it. All 
the poetry he undertook to turn into prose, as Wendell 
Phillips wanted Lincoln's proclamation, in Georgia, 
in spurs and boots. Whatever could be truly said or 
sung, with him must be done. Radical doctrine, says 
my Orthodox friend, is not practical : it goes to pieces 
in North Street. In Parker's hands every thing the 
doctrine was opposed to went to pieces, — as Schiller 
says of the cannon-ball shattering all in its way that 
it may shatter its mark. Call the new views mist.f* 
He condensed them into a thunder-bolt. Call them 
nebulous ? He showed they were world-stuff. Slavery, 
intemperance, vice, criminal classes, perishing classes, 
no cause or human condition but he took for his prov- 
ince. Overladen with social work in Boston, he 
carried his crusade against superstition and iniquity 
into every corner of the land. Soft-hearted, he made 
his sensibilities the furnace in which to forge his 
weapons, beside the transcendental writings which 
were his Springfield armory. Many friendly ties 
broke under his heresy. He seemed to have gone to 
the funeral of his affections, till he lost all bias of 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 



77 



sentiment, and dealt justice without extraneous con- 
siderations. He disowned the maxim that scorn and 
anger were instruments unfit to be used. Only bad 
men had no right to them ! Whose contempt should 
be so great, whose wrath so terrible, as that of the 
good against the ungodly and all their works? He 
had no private malice, bore no grudge against the 
individuals he publicly scored ; but he carried his an- 
tipathies of principle so far as to be styled an intel- 
lectual ruffian. Calling of names in meeting, where 
the assailed cannot answer, appears to them an unfair 
advantage, and stirs ill blood. To impeach the mo- 
tives serves less than to argue the case. But though 
his sarcasm was resented and complained of, it was 
the base custom or false doctrine the holders had 
identified themselves with which felt his severity. 
In that his arrows stuck. Dr. Channing said the 
slaveholder was to him an abstraction : it was the 
system of slavery he discussed. Mr. Garrison an- 
swered. Is the slaveholder an abstraction to the slave ? 
To Parker, sin was a man. Living in Luther's time, 
he would have believed in and thrown his inkstand at 
the devil. Incarnate evil he condemned, and would 
make way with that Dagon, planting his shoulders 
like another Samson at the pillars of Gaza. " Stick 
or stone, whatever comes to hand," says Virgil, " the 
mob will throw." His only choice among means of of- 
fence was of the most effective, thinking no such rights 
of war as Grotius describes belonged to wrong-doers, 
in the conflict of words. For the tyrant or traitor he 
had wrath, and freely drew for his portrait a copy of 
Herod or Iscariot ; for the bibliolater, ridicule, — but 



^8 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

his anger or irony, like the Indian bullet that cleaves 
the buffalo and pursues its way, went through the 
embodiment to the essence of mischief in society and 
the soul. Had the Calvinist some artificial condition 
of redemption? He laughed at it as like a red string 
tied round the little finger for an amulet or charm. 
He was not revealer, but administrator, of a new 
testament ; and Cobden or Cobbett, Webster or Lin- 
coln, did not use a more resistless plainness of speech. 
He had occasion. Religion had deceased into tenet, 
like the coral insect into the coral bed. Men were at 
ease in Zion : liturgy had become lethargy. As the 
keeper stirs the sleepy lion with his pole, or the elec- 
trician passes a spark through the torpid frame, or the 
guide shakes and rouses the traveller sinking to deathly 
slumber in the snow, he made no scruple of roughly 
disturbing the more fatal repose of the elect in their 
assurance of heaven, while leaving their brethren to 
perish of oppression on earth. When the fugitive was 
in his house, this new Templar added cocked pistols on 
his pillow to his grandfather's rusty gun at the door, 
and was ready with word or blow. He had a relish for 
irony and enjoyed the fray. When one said to him, 
" You have not your ancestor's military bent," " Have 
I not ? " he grimly replied. His brain was a masked 
battery ever ready to be unlimbered. As public 
questions degenerate into private disputes, he some- 
times descended into personalities and details which 
he should have looked down on from the sun. But 
truth took a step forward in his word. 

Yet Liberal Christians, already persecuted as ex- 
tremists, not onlv refused to follow, but hesitated to 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 



79 



own his freedom of thought. They had gone far 
enough. It was time to stop. Channing was the last 
result of reason. An inch more was the jumping-ofF 
place. Parker had assailed what Channing stoutly 
defended, — the supernatural ; and the miracles of 
the New if not of the Old Testament were now the 
citadel whose defence alone prevented the surrender 
of Christianity. Belief in them was made the test. 
Norton maintained the miraculous as the essence of re- 
ligion. Channing was disappointed in Parker because 
he declared it unessential, if not untrue ; but Parker 
has prevailed, if not in refuting or setting aside, yet 
in displacing it as the touchstone. Moreover, he 
questioned any verbal gospel. The leading scholars 
had with much trouble purged the text. He denied 
the authority of the text, however pure. He removed 
every outward landmark, and planted the boundaries 
in the soul. What we shrank from was the logical 
conclusion. Yet the basis the Unitarian majority 
still repose in is the history, the prophet, not the 
human mind. That is not trusted as a final organ of 
truth. Channing is leaned on as the pillar of this 
Scripture position, and it will by many be held sacri- 
lege to doubt his claims as a seer. His writings, 
however, hold not with thinkers their place. They 
defy not the tooth of time. His genius was for reflec- 
tion and sentiment rather than insight. Eloquence 
was his peculiar mark. Who that was young when 
he was in his prime can forget the matchless sim- 
plicity and fervor of his speech, — that voice of melody 
so singular, and resonance one could not credit from 
the slender chest, audible to the vast congregation 



80 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

because of the might of interior whispers it reverber- 
ated ; not a syllable lost because every one was satu- 
rated with spirit, and carrying the hearer to heaven 
on that unique rising inflection which, though a gen- 
eration has passed, must still ring in every ear on 
which it once fell? Yet, in the record on the cold 
page, eloquence takes up too much room. We tire, 
if we read for information or new direction, of the 
long climacteric roll. As the world quickens its speed, 
we dislike preface : we want pith, and praise orators 
like the English who give us figures of arithmetic 
rather than rhetoric, and come to the point. Emerson, 
in the region of intellect, meets this demand. He sees 
too clearly and too much to dilate with emotion or 
expand his phrase. If his style for a moment takes 
on a fine sound, he resists temptation, checks the 
impulse. Immensity of meaning constrains him to 
study economy of words. Channing called him poet, 
but no philosopher. But there is no distinction of 
poetry from truth. Only verse-wrights deal with the 
unreal. Shakspeare is as prudent as Bacon, as judi- 
cious as Hooker, as metaphysical as Kant. Emerson 
reaches the supreme height, if not of Mont Blanc, yet 
one of the aiguilles. 

As a philanthropist, Channing was sublime ; but 
truth is the highest philanthropy, and whoever de- 
scribes a cii'cle about yours exceeds you as benefactor. 
To behold and declare how things stand in the uni- 
verse, — to widen a man's horizon, — is a greater 
mercy than to feed or clothe. A good feeling, a 
humane theory, does not suffice. Conscious benevo- 
lence is a lower motive than Christ's martyrdom for 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 8 1 

the truth. Channlng's feeble heahh and solitary life 
separated him from the race his ideal goodness would 
bless. He spoke as an apostle, hardly of the same 
blood with those who heard, discoursed downward 
from his desk, distanced the laboring men he talked to, 
held at arm's length the masses for whom he professed 
his interest and in whom he felt a serious concern. 
He was not in direct fellowship. He had views rather 
than vision. He used a reflecting telescope, not the 
naked eye. Conversing with him, one felt not so 
much like a fellow-creature as part of the instrument 
he was at work with to find and catalogue the celestial 
facts. He respected another's mind as an explorer 
does his companion for his help in the expedition. 
Something not organic, but derivative, characterizes 
his instructions. "A potted Plato" one called him. 
Unsurpassably lofty in feeling and aim, his page is so 
deficient in close reason or imagination one-half the 
sentences can be omitted with no disturbance of the 
method or loss of sense. Not for the sake of odious 
comparison, but of a true leadership, I would lift the 
standard on which testimony is blazoned in larger let- 
ters than any scheme even of charity. To one whose 
sermons had disturbed his audience it was said, " Why 
not suit and time your matter better to those in your 
charge? I suppose you preach to do good?" " No,'* 
lie answered : " I do not. I preach to testify. Let 
me be true. God will see to the good, which he alone 
is and does." The great modern character is the 
reporter, who keeps the world of society and politics 
in motion. But he is tool and servant of another head- 
reporter of thought, of an interviewer of conscience, 

6 



82 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

of a watcher of that sky Coleridge looked at when he 
said, " Only after celestial observations can terrestrial 
charts be constructed." It will make you see stars^ 
says the coarse worldly proverb, of any sudden shock. 
But these spiritual stars are no unsubstantial sparkles 
of a stunned brain. The eye that saw them can turn the 
other way, and in "English Traits" and " Representa- 
tive Men" prove as keen in the earthly direction as in 
the heavenly. It is all in the eye^ whose lenses no 
surveyor's theodolite can match. He who has sight 
need not attack another or defend himself. This 
ocular or binocular arm makes a new style of warfare, 
like that introduced into the field. Caesar led his 
troops. Napoleon figures in a cocked hat, and Jack- 
son on his horse. In the holy bard's imagery, the 
Most High is made to copy human warriors, gird his 
sword on his thigh, and ride prosperously to battle. 
But here is a war most wonderful in history, fought 
by an invisible man called Moltke, without musket, 
spear, or coat of mail, — only map and pencil ; and a 
million of men stand ready to follow where he draws. 
It is a ghostly conflict, rehearsed on the stage of fancy : 
the awful engines play harmless as a little model in 
the secret chambers of the brain, before hosts fall 
dead and fortresses capitulate, and civil populations, a 
hundred-fold more than the beleaguering army, sur- 
render and sue for peace, and the old boundaries 
of nations are changed. Not by unreasoning passion 
are social victories won. Said Ichabod Nichols, when 
one talked of using strong words, " Put your strength 
into your reasons." Poisoning of wells. Southern pro- 
posals to import plague into the North, assassination, 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. g-l 

and starvation do not carry the day. The Commu- 
nist throws petroleum to fire the city, pulls down the 
Column, tears up coffins and murders priests; but 
brings not in the free, equal, and fraternal reign. In 
America or France such methods make the gentler 
sex the worse. Light is better than lightning ; and 
lightning is the best social and civil help when tamed 
to run soft and obedient on an errand. The great 
reformer is the discerner, — 

"Who revolutions works without a murmur, 
Or rustling of a leaf beneath the skiee." 

Transcendentalism relies on those ideas in the mind 
which are laws in the life. Pantheism is said to sink 
man and nature in God, Materialism to sink God 
and man in nature, and Transcendentalism to sink 
God and nature in man. But the Transcendentalist, at 
least, is belied and put in jail by the definition, which 
is so neat at the expense of truth. He made con- 
sciousness, not sense, the ground of truth ; and, in the 
present devotion to physical science and turn of philos- 
ophy to build the universe on foundations of matter, 
we need to vindicate and reassert his premise. Is the 
soul reared on the primitive rock? or is no rock primi- 
tive, but the deposit of spirit, therefore in its lowest 
form alive, and ever rising into organism to reach the 
top of the eternal circle again, — as in the well one 
bucket goes down empty and the other rises full? 
The mistake is to make the everlasting things subjects 
of argument instead of sight. No logic can compass 
them. The more we reason about them in the terms 
of the understanding, the farther we are away. Wait 



84 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

awhile, says the investigator, and we may tell you if 
God exists and you are immortal. But God is no 
conclusion. A Deity deduced from phenomena were 
finite as they, and nothing worth. God is the com- 
mencement, if he be at all ; and to expect, by breaking 
open some atom, to see him come out like the smoke 
into a giant from the fisherman's box is atheism at the 
start. 

The Transcendentalist sought a basis of knowledge 
beyond the senses, and of religion beyond ecclesiastical 
services. His religious feelings were hurt by going 
to church, and he encountered the odium of going into 
the woods and fields, or on to the sea instead. He 
affronted the procession of Sabbath-keepers with the 
needless insult of secular avocations, or sports in plain 
sight. Because it was Sunda}^, in a meeting-house and 
a pulpit, and with a Scripture text and ordained minis- 
ter, bigotry and bad scholarship were not sanctified. 
He heard not only the truckman and porter swear, but 
the name of God taken in vain in the worst profanity 
of the lifeless repetition of liturgical forms. In rocky 
resounding clefts, he could worship better than in the 
house made with hands. Standing outside the church- 
door, the music of praise pleased him better that he 
could not hear the sectarian sermon. On the reelinjj 
steamer's deck, with ecstasy through the cabin-win- 
dows came to him the anthem accompanied with a 
part, described in no musical notation, by the winds 
and waves. He disowned the temple's peculiar claim ; 
and a band of play-actors with the sacrifice of their 
talent and time to help some poor and aged member, 
or promote a worthy cause, made the stage a pulpit. 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 85 

and the theatre a church. Holy day or place ? There 
is no such thing. A holy man or woman, and a Holy 
Spirit, but no holy time or spot save that hallowed 
by a righteous act. Sacred office or exercise.^ An 
innocent child teaches more than a sensual priest, 
politic cardinal, or bad pope ; and we scout the notion 
that any base officials are in trust with the waters of 
salvation, or have a lock on the river of life as one 
commands a valve or faucet w^ith his hand. A face 
with the beauty of that shadow cast by the first con- 
sciousness of a parentage beyond earthly father or 
mother communicates wisdom which canonical books 
and apostolic succession cannot match. As in old 
time some people worshipped in churches and clois- 
ters outside city walls, these Transcendentalists de- 
fied the conventional adoration with a piety of their 
own. 

The Transcendental school must, however, encounter 
one criticism. Part of it led into the doctrine of Divine 
Impersonality. Emerson followed Cousin. The ob- 
jection to Personality was its supposed limitation. It 
lowered the Infinite. But you say a great deal about 
God when you say he is hnpersonal. You lower him 
negatively, and deny his chief attribute, if not his being. 
The guilt of presumption is not avoided, but incurred. 
Does piety decline to imprison him in human meas- 
ures? We had thought humanity not his prison, but 
his image. What other larger measure of him do 
you propose? The sky were a prison. Besides, we 
do not measure God : he measures himself with count- 
less graduations in all his creatures, and without this 
self-measurement on an endless scale we could not 



86 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

know him at all. We conceive ill of him in outward 
dimensions like a giant. He can fill the firmament, 
and dole himself out in the wing of a fly, brain of an 
ant, or burnish and buzz of a bee. He is spirit ; and 
that we cannot imagine as impersonal. Spirit is intelli- 
gence and intent. If you hesitate to ascribe to him 
purpose, you resist the instinct of mankind in all ages, 
which from the Hottentot to the Hindoo, the China- 
man to the North-American Indian, the Greek to 
the Turk, and the Christian to the Mahometan, finds 
the staple and fundamental article of its devotion in the 
will of God. In teaching that he is spirit, and that 
birth from the Spirit is like the sound of the wind, 
Jesus curiously identifies spirit and person as syno- 
nyms of speech. Spirit or Person : neither implies 
finiteness more than the other. 

The world affirms Personality. Is world or whirled 
its proper name ? What is it but motion from centres 
of force, in mighty balls or imponderable particles : 
in the stone that resolves itself into orbits of atoms, 
and the drop that is a sea for living things to swim, nor, 
more than leviathan, lack room } All this action, and 
no will? Nothing too heavy to lift, or too light and 
little to get hold of; yet no agent, meaning, energy, 
or behest? If no divine, then no human personality, 
which were a causeless effect. In scholastic phrase 
God is not personated^ but personating Person. If 
this human quality is no gauge of him, he is lost alto- 
gether, as we are lost ; for with our personality goes 
immortality, and we are photograph-plates taking 
pictures to-day, broken to-morrow ; and then no more 
impressions. A strange way to dignify and exalt the 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 87 

Divinity to make him and his work such a shallow 
fading surface ! To say he is an idea of the human 
mind, and comes to consciousness, or is conscious of 
himself in it, does not belittle him. Ideas are substan- 
tial and eternal ; and where or how else he is conscious 
who shall say ? You have several homes, — in city, 
country, at the Springs, or by the sea. His houses 
who shall number? 

Person signifies the unfathomable. Who shall say 
where the whisper of the wind begins? A man's 
voice or sound is from his inmost self, like the character 
an actor performed through his mask ; and what is the 
material universe but the pipe Omnipotence shapes, 
as a boy his whistle, to play what tunes he likes. God 
is the word : what speaks in the beginning was with 
him and was he. Personality is no degradation. As 
the sparkle of a dewdrop implies the sun, and that is 
a spark to the light that feeds it ; as a trickling drop 
balances the sea, and nothing less could be its parent ; 
as the running of the drops together between the 
shrunken boards of a barn first brought to my mind 
the mystery of the world ; as a breath were not with- 
out boundless ether ; as a pebble dropped in the water 
or as a blow or gesture of the hand goes to the con- 
fines of Nature and is co-extensive with gravitation, — 
so the faintest emotion implies the Most High ; and 
God takes up his abode in the lowly and contrite heart. 

Doubtless we bely him, as we do every thing, in 
our speech. But it is greater untruth to him not to 
speak. Some word we cannot help. Those most stout 
like Goethe to say all words are inadequate go on to 
use them, though every word, used or emphasized 



88 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

alone, cleaves from our thought and breaks down. 
But if we discard the Infinite Self we lose the Uni- 
verse^ which is Version of One, or Person translated ; 
and what does Person mean but that the world is not 
senseless surface, but stands for something, was made 
in earnest, and not by accident or for sport? Person- 
ality is not part of it, but the whole, — top and bottom 
of things, sum and substance of philosophy ; and the 
impersonality the sage imputes as an honor is poor, 
cheap, and finite. We argue what are called the 
Carlyle and Buckle theories of history. Are events 
determined by persons, or by laws? If history relates 
what is done by inspiration or design, the question 
disappears. Personality is nothing, or it is all. It is 
not the pound we put God in, but essence of the free- 
dom which is his necessity, and to share which is man's 
glory. If we are personal, we have a destiny ; if im- 
personal, only a doom. But this personal persistence 
was by some Transcendentalists treated with slight ; 
and all curiosity about it flouted as impertinent peep- 
ing into what we had no business with. Such scorn 
is affront to the aspiration of mankind. Forceythe 
Willson, after listening to a lecture that brought im- 
mortality into doubt, said, " Philosophy is good ; but if 
philosophy contradicts my instincts, I throw it over- 
board." 

Personality alone vindicates prayer. If Deity be 
Immeasurable Consciousness in which I have part and 
lot, then prayer is no gymnastic self-excitation begin- 
ning and ending with my own will, but some stir of 
the Divinity it comes from and goes to. It constrains 
God so far as his libertv can be constrained ; for there 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 89 

is that he cannot help. How can he help seeing and 
hearing his child whose voice is part of his soliloquy ? 
Can he say, I will not listen or look? He is bound 
in his own nature to hear and answer prayer ; for he 
is not one Individual and you another, he sitting up 
there with ready-made laws to apply to you as a foreign 
substance ; but you and he, even as Jesus and he, 
are One. He cannot get along without you, or avoid 
blessing you. Your inmost desire is his interpreter. 
Were prayer an arbitrary whim, across the track of 
his predestination it were crushed like a pin on the 
iron rail. But request or answer is foreordained and 
insured against possible failure or loss. 

To one Transcendental philosopher — Mr. Alcott — 
we are in debt for his vital conception of Personality. 
A pure mystic, subsisting on the thin sweet grass of the 
mount of vision, in the full sweep of the pervading 
theory that blew like a trade-wind against the concep- 
tion of a conscious and willing Deity, he kept his foot- 
ing and saw God keeping his. In all his Conversations 
East and West expounding matters, so singular to 
charm and hard to penetrate, he has held by selfhood 
as the sheet-anchor of creation, and rendered a service 
for which his memory will be honorable and dear. 
He was true Transcendentalist, teaching that the soul is 
no ephemeral thing, but lives beyond the momentary 
imipression, in the past, the distant, the future, and in that 
eternity where time disappears or all times are alike. 
True philosophy is no peculiarity of dainty speculation, 
but staple of practical life. It is an idea becoming 
flesh, or common sense exalted by sentiment. Not 



90 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

only a poet, like Wordsworth, can address his ideal 
child, — 

"Thou whose exterior semblance doth bely 
Thy soul's immensity," 

not only Shakspeare can make Lady Macbeth say to 
her husband, — 

*' Thy letters have transported me beyond 
This ignorant present, and I feel now 
The future in the instant, " 

but the negro pilot could tell the captain in Charleston 
harbor, " Wind and tide against you, it is ten miles 
to the city ; but, weather favoring, you are there now." 
We are not blind to what we see through. The Tran- 
scendentalist leaps out of routine, shakes off the weight 
of custom, most are fettered by and drag as a ball and 
chain. He detaches every thing from himself, to make 
it an object of contemplation and enchanting marvel. 
His own personality he wonders at, and tries half 
vainly to explore. ^' I want to know more of myself, 
— this very Jonathan : I have lived seventy years with 
him, and he is a great mystery to me." His theory 
enters into character as well as thought. While dog- 
matism makes out its exhaustive schemes of the uni- 
verse, and ambitious conceit and desire to shine 
babble their presumptuous judgments, he sits and 
smiles at the depth their lines dangle in ; and, when 
they correct or contradict him, learns not to answer 
again. He asks nothing for himself but to be allowed 
still to think, and put his observations in words which 
passion may reject till reason receives. He takes all 
injury and wrong, from foes or friends, out of his sen- 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 9I 

sibility and into the alembic of his reflections, whence 
the crude ore and rough fragments run pure gold. No 
Caliban or Shylock but enriches the poet's drama ; 
no people so bad and hard the thinker cannot enjoy. 
Said my friend, I like that " Great Misery " island : it 
is like so many folks I have seen, barren and unpromis- 
ing at a distance and first sight ; but when you are 
there, the green fields are all around you. His forecast 
lights up the darkest hour. Said my friend, walking 
among the cliffs, Reasoning is like the rock ahead you 
hope to mount and see further from ; and faith has 
foretaste of paradise. 

We shall discover that our glory is not pure passivity, 
to be the sport of impressions, like feathers in every 
wandering breeze, but personality. We shall be con- 
vinced that conscious selfhood rooted in the self of 
Nature, and spreading into man or angel, is no selfish- 
ness, but the only possible generosity. A certain dis- 
solute sympathy may survive self-reliance ; but all 
genuine love and sacrifice die with it. No earthly 
good a noble pesron will not sooner decline or im- 
part than demand. Personality has no measure : it 
is measure of every thing else. It is the golden rod 
with which the angel takes the length and breadth of 
the New Jerusalem. In the present rage of physical 
science the f articles are contending with it for victory. 
But they are its servants, and usurpers when they 
snatch at its rightful sway. The thinker goes with his 
thought, which can reach nothing beyond itself. No 
God is cognizable above my inmost being, which he is. 
Where my imagination goes, I go ; and it goes to him 
and heaven. 



\^ 



92 



RADICAL PROBLEMS. 



The objection to personality in God is its likening 
him to man's which is limited. But this objection 
assumes its own fact. Who has laid down or re- 
ported the metes and bounds of human personality ? 
It is unlimited. Person in the sense of appearance is 
finite. The body which the soul is in, or rather which 
is in the soul, has limits, but not that in which the 
body is contained. Man's eyes, saj's Herbert, " dis- 
mount the highest star." David's description of trying 
to leave the Lord by ascending to heaven, or making 
his bed in hell, or flying on the wings of the morning 
to the uttermost parts of the sea, not only shows where 
God was, but where David was ! Is our imagination 
the compass of Nature? But our imagination is the 
carriage we sit in. Paul knew a man who was in the 
seventh heaven. Rise high and float far as the balloon 
will, the gazer from beleaguered Paris walls, or a 
Fourth of July muster-field, outstrips it standing on 
the ground. 

" One morn is in the mighty heaven, 
And one in our desire ! " 

But the last outshines the first. 

" And those eyes, the break of day, 
Lights that do mislead the morn." 

Shakspeare knew space was not the holder, but the 
accident and servant of the mind. We, like God, 
possess it ; not it us. " I own part of Boston Common," 
said Father Taylor ; " and I will tell nobody which part 
it is." We cannot tell where our property in Nature 
ends. 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 



93 



Nor Is human personality limited in time more than 
in space. Doubtless the almanac or family register 
will tell us when we were born. But our soul is older 
than our organism. It precedes its clothing. It is 
the cause, not the consequence, of its material elements ; 
else, as materialists understand, it does not properly 
exist. Jesus asserted the truth of all men when he 
said, "Before Abraham was, I am." Who can tell 
where he began? It is a wise child that knows his 
own father. Grandparents reappear in the babes they 
play with. The Jews thought older prophets returned 
in later ones ; and it might be Ellas that had come 
back in Jesus. Naturalism traces man farther than to 
Eden, and finds his progenitor in some fossil fish or 
reptile that lived measureless cycles ago. Napoleon 
said he was the founder of his own family. We were 
our own ancestors, and shall find it quite impossible 
to decide our commencement in time, though we point 
to our cradle in the garret. We all lay in one crib, if 
we knew where it was ; and Plato's doctrine of pre- 
existence we have laughed at only to see it recur under 
the flag of the straitest orthodoxy of our day. 

Human personality has no intrinsic limitation in 
itself. It is sometimes said, men or particular races 
of men, as the Negro or Chinese, stop growing like 
an animal or plant. But they are only by adverse 
circumstance or their fellow-creature's oppression teth- 
ered for a time. None can predict or set any goal 
to the progress of science. Yet that is only one of 
the lines : art, society, government, are others in the 
progress of man. This shock of conventional horror 
at supposing any likeness of God with man is as pro- 



94 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

fane as it is inhuman. God and man must rise or 
fall together. We have been afraid and ashamed 
to think nobly of ourselves. But he is like us ! He 
made us in his image ; and, laugh at it who will, 
we do and inust somehow make him in ours ; for 
were the parent unlike his child, it were absurd to 
speak of parent or child. 

Nothing in us lasts like faith. Richter calls it the 
night-flower blooming into the hour when sense and 
memory fade. I learned the fact in an involuntary 
experiment of being thrown to the ground by a train 
of cars. It was "a. vision of sudden death." For 
a moment it was all of death that can be known, only 
that in returning consciousness came resurrection to 
myself and my friends. But in that moment of de- 
cease was no fear. Had I been riding above, not 
with a crushed limb underneath, I could have felt no 
more sure of the wise regularity, in whose chariot 
without falling I was borne. 

Orthodoxy and Physical Science are considered 
foes. But they build on the same foundation. In their 
method they meet. The last asserts we get all knowl- 
edge, and the first that we get religious knowledge, 
through the senses, — the Book, the Prophecy, the 
Miracle being the foundations of faith, as if there 
were less piety in Plato than in Locke. Transcen- 
dental Thought is the only communion with God, 
save by some proxy that casts our vote for us, like 
a master for his slaves, or patron for everybody under 
the roof of his mill. What wonder the believer 
should conclude in the scepticism with which the 
scientist begins, and doubt be the Land's End for them 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 95 

both. With neither is any option. The structures 
they put up are different, but the site of both aHke 
is the sand ; only the behever sees not how he is 
logically shut up to the scientist's frank expectation 
that the rain and the wind will beat and blow till the 
edifice fall, according to the Latin proverb that we 
owe our possessions and ourselves alike to death. 
The consistent physicist, like Mill, carries his point 
to the denial of all necessary truth. The figures of 
the multiplication-table and the properties of a trian- 
gle, all the axioms of the mathematician and geom- 
eter, a square, cube, line, or circle, may be such onlv 
to us and not in some other world, there being no 
such thing as ascertainable truth. The contemptuous 
proverb, " He does not know much, and what he does 
know he does not know for certain," hits the whole 
race with its vulgar fling. The Christian solace so 
many millions have hugged to their breast, " What thou 
knowest not now thou shalt know hereafter," is re- 
fused ; for death is no solution, but only the last dodge. 
So truth is not what is, but what one troweth ; a 
name for everybody's notion and all contradictory 
beliefs ! It is the honor of the Transcendentalist — 
every great soul from Hebrew Moses to Hebraic 
John Brown — to affirm truth otherwise as eternal 
vision of what suffers no change, the consonance of 
reality in Nature and the mind. Apart from percep- 
tion truth is not. The Greek tongue excels the 
English in having a verb for truth corresponding to 
the noun, and the apostle speaks of " truthing in 
love." No canonical book has a nobler verse than 
that in the Apocrypha, — " Wisdom is a loving spirit : " 



g6 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

for love is not born of wisdom, but wisdom of love ; 
and neither is born of matter or the flesh. To rest 
our case in miracle is to rest it in the letter that kill- 
eth ; for all phenomena, like the letters in the Primer, 
are but an alphabet making sense only as arranged 
by some intelligence. It matters not what shape 
matter may take : it is an unmeaning syllable till 
adopted by the intellect. If the water became wine, 
or a few loaves and fishes a ton of food, it was a 
cipher still of no significance before it was chosen 
to convey the spirit's despatch. It is not the wire 
stretching from England to America for which we 
care ; but the messages sent over it beneath the deep, 
unquenched by all its billows, unsilenced by its 
mighty roar. 

Preoccupied with ideas, God's true mediators, we 
look upon marvels with an incurious eye. I confess 
I am not moved when the table tips. The wonder 
is just as great when it reposes firmly on its legs. 
Stones thrown through the windows by freakish elfs 
hold not my reflections like the glass made from the 
flux of their crumbled grains. All is in discrimina- 
tion ; nothing in the gross fact. The delicate odor 
of a tea-rose, said one, transports me : but at one 
smell of the pond-lily I say, No more I thank you ! 
The Divinity gives us facts enough. We cannot 
manage one of a thousand. I rather ask him to stay 
his hand than from his horn of plenty continue to 
pour. He has led me into the Gallery ; and I have 
no fear of his hurrying me out before it is half seen. 
The Transfiguration by Raphael, or Wedding-feast 
in Cana by Paul Veronese, or Conception by Corregio, 



m 



TRANSCENDENTALISM. 9^ 

is not a subject that holds or concentres my regards 
more than any simply human theme, — a ship in port 
by Turner, landscape by Corot, or the " Sower" by 
Millet ; for God is as near in the field or on the sea 
as by any mountain, in any marriage or origin of life, 
with whatever unusual signs. Sinai made no better 
thunder and lightning than the Jura, or the wood- 
crowned hill whence in my boyhood the flaming 
cloud made its rush, and the red bolt leaped as a 
sword from the scabbard. I am grateful to antece- 
dents and ancestors ; but why explore the processes 
by which they earned what I inherit, instead of for my 
posterity earning more ? I value the Bible ; but shall 
I prefer it to what it records ? It were to prize the 
family-register before the domestic joy. The Scrip- 
tures are not authority, but notes and memorandum 
book for experience, which has no Heretofore or 
Hereafter or Elsewhere, but interminable omnipres- 
ent Now. 



IV. 

RADICALISM. 

WE learn how much there is in a name to love or 
hate. The apostles, forbid to speak in the 
name of Jesus, rejoiced to be counted worthy to suffer 
shame for it. It is not the word that is detested, but 
the thought, the dearest part of a man. He that lov- 
eth father or mother more than that is not worthy of 
it. " I do not like the word Radical " is the last phrase 
in thousand-fold repetition. But is it well to quarrel 
with the dictionary, like Don Quixote with the wind- 
mill ? Words do not exist by our permission or any 
governor's proclamation. God makes them. They 
are born out of the air. Democrat, Republican, Cop- 
perhead, Communist, — it were easier to reduce a fort 
than silence any such epithet. Chartist, Fenian, In- 
ternational, — William or Victoria might be glad to 
expunge those titles. But they will not down at the 
bidding of count or king. No arrival so important as 
that of a new denomination, a name in the mouth, an 
organic power on the earth. Dr. Channing said he 
belonged to no sect, but willingly bore the name Uni- 
tarian on account of its odium. I do not choose to be 
called Radical ; but, if it be an unpopular designation, 



RADICALISM. 



99 



label me with it. It must mean something good. Let 
us be what respectability and conservatism have an 
instinct to scorn ! Out of some corruption is forged 
every new thunder-bolt of speech which people depre- 
cate and dread. Yet a bad name loses its repulsive- 
ness by degrees. As the tortoise shell is cut and 
scraped, dropping some roughness with each process, 
at every touch of the saw and file and sand, to get its 
last polish from the human palm, so a distasteful term, 
Whig or Abolitionist, under the critical knife and after 
much handling, shows signs of preciousness, becomes 
bright and smooth. Print it, roll it under your tongue, 
and it will come out right. 

Everybody takes his turn at reform. The Tory 
Eldon said with an oath, if he could begin again it 
would be as an agitator. We know the ethics of com- 
fromise and temporize. Men have made Christ's 
tenderness in withholding some things from his disci- 
ples a warrant for treachery. An eminent preacher 
says he has thoughts it were premature to publish. 
What is the time to tell a thought but when you have 
it? The inspiration is your commission. 

Radicalism is rootedness^ the quality of the root, 
which Paul says we are borne by and do not bear, 
the stability of plant or man. Is it tearing up by the 
roots? Jesus announces that operation for what his 
Father had not set out. But the gardener knows how 
the good tree is made thrifty by going down to its 
roots to stir them. Scraping my old myrtle makes it 
quick and green. 

There are two kinds of radicalism. The one boasts : 
the other prays, and joins the great communion of 



lOO RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

human dependence. Faith is no manufacture or article 
of private consumption, but a tradition of the human 
race. The mark, not to be counterfeited, of the genu- 
ine Radical is humility, — confessing God in history, 
that we are lifted to our vantage-ground by all fore- 
going action as mountains rise by successive throes. 
My dear friend professes to put himself squarely out- 
side of Christianity, and thinks so he does ; but he can 
no more do it than eliminate from his veins his ances- 
tral blood. Do we disdain to inherit civilization, gov- 
ernment, art, material benefit from our sires ? Let us 
then raze the old houses and shops, despise the custom 
of the ancient stand, pry up the rails we ride over, 
and, as the Irishman said, to decry asking my neigh- 
bor's help, not be under a compliment to anybody ! 
Is there no moral capital? Can we dispense with 
customs and institutions more than with the wharf and 
street, reservoir and sidewalk, town-house and bridge ? 
Jacob's well stood for more than water. Better un- 
limber your organ of destructiveness on outward im- 
provements, than those within. Continuation, not 
origination, is our part. Build on the old basis, stand 
and walk a step forward in the old path. If God be 
father, the Past is mother, of our mind. I heard of a 
man preferring his immortality to his source, his own 
existence to his Maker's. He was logical, on the sup- 
position that he was made by himself and for himself, 
and, like the Pharisee, to pray thus with himself. But 
if there be such a thing as Humanity, that I am part 
of, then there is Divinity. A disinherited man we 
pity ; a disinherited race were extinct. 

Stef by step : that title of the story is the tale of 



RADICALISM. lOI 

mankind. We are to rear an Art Museum. On what 
ground ? First, a wilderness ; then a battle-field with 
savage nature and more savage man ; then a harvest- 
field ; then a mart of commerce ; lastly, the hall of 
knowledge and delight. Contempt of the rudest abo- 
riginal ways knocks out the underpinning. 

But we must go on. " There are in Boston," said 
one to an old citizen, " no ancient families to justify 
pride of birth." The citizen replied, "We have their 
descendants." " Point me," was the rejoinder, " to 
one case of the blue blood." " I do not like to be 
egotistical," answered again the long-descended man. 
Doubtless we need the grace of self-criticism to temper 
self-complacency. Our individuality runs not only into 
variety, but oddity. In avoiding monotony and uni- 
formity, we lose unity in our architecture. Let the 
new Museum be an academy to reclaim us from our 
riot of independence to some standard of beauty and 
criterion of taste, not only in our edifices but our man- 
ners and thoughts, to grow from that root without 
which there can neither be a great community nor a 
California pine. 

But let us have the branch as well as the root. No 
conceit of progress is so gross as that of eschewing all 
change. What absurdity is this circular and printed 
sketch of doctrine, sent us to sign, as if words could be 
bonds or bounds ! We must be atomically united, like 
the parts of a tree, with the Spirit for our enlivening 
sap. At a meeting for church union I heard a speech 
informing the company how Unitarians were to be 
killed oflf, by preparation of books of moral science 
suited to establish the Trinitarian truth. Harness a 



I02 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

horse of high spirit into your chaise, he travels with 
alacrity and joy. But he would resent being tackled 
into a truck ; and the Holy Ghost, set to drawing 
the old cart which passes for the Church, will tear it 
to pieces. If you would be safe, hitch a donkey into 
your dray. Science a means, and your establishment 
the end? Everything outward must serve the soul. 
Every creed is an arrested development. We think 
of the Bible as a structure solid and eternal. It is the 
record of alteration without ceasing, — patriarchs giving 
way to judges, judges to kings, kings to priests, priests 
to prophets, and prophets to Jesus their head, and 
Jesus to the Spirit. Vital power sloughs off old form- 
ulas. Some Northern churches had negro galleries a 
quarter of a century ago. It was suggested, in one 
case, to evacuate or remove the wooden box from 
which, as one said, the colored folk looked down on 
the congregation like crows. The fierce and almost 
universal opposition to this it is difficult now to con- 
ceive. But at length the high enclosure went ; and 
not by all the king's horses and all the king's men 
could it be restored. So pass the stifFest ceremonials 
beyond recovery. Who could be at charges or shave 
the head to conciliate bigots, as Paul and his compan- 
ions did? Yet, such is the superstition for Scripture 
examples, a friend says on the strength of that old in- 
stance he could cross himself among the Catholics. 
Does then an apostle's act of course indicate the law 
of perfect conduct? If the Trinitarian Doxology be 
sung, I can join in the tune, but not in the words. 
When one declined a true believer's asking for alms, 
saying, " I am a heretic," " Oh, sir, your money is 



RADICALISM. lO^ 

orthodox," was the reply. Of the orthodoxy of good 
music there is no doubt. 

True Radicalism is also of a loving spirit. There 
is a sour sort of it, the fruit being still green ; but the 
ripe and sweet variety we shall have to adopt. We 
fix on a creed as final, as the farmer calls his choice 
apple Seek-no-further ; but the new growth outstrips 
and leaves it behind. Progress is the law. When the 
Eastern Railway was built, ample room was X^it at 
the crossings for the cars. But forty bridges have to 
be raised to let the Pullman palace cars pass through. 
Narrow terms of Christian communion have at great 
expense of good feeling to be pulled down ; else the 
Church becomes one of those corporations that have 
no soul. Like University graduation, like organic 
evolution. Free Religion is an unfolding of previous 
forms, and is not that bolting from them affected by 
some, ending like the side path I took in the woods, — 
in a swamp and a squirrel track. A good man hu- 
morously expressed the development in his case by 
saying, " I spell my God with two ^'s, and my devil 
without a d:' In an old anti-slavery Quaker family I 
served at the funeral of a young man who had never 
heard a dozen sermons, yet was a pattern of all good 
works. His wedding-day had been set, the bride's 
wedding-dress made, the wedding-house nearly done ; 
yet he welcomed death. The Eastern mists were the 
mourning robes ; but the bereaved had clad themselves 
in cheerful attire. As it pleases God the beautiful 
flowers should grow not only in gardens and enclos- 
ures, fenced from the cold and the wind, but on wild 
hill-sides, along uncultured meadows and plains, and 



I04 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

up near the snow-line of Alpine peaks, so, not in any 
revival hot-house or paradise of a sectarian conventicle, 
the finest human excellence springs. Virtue within 
and without the ritual must be compared. The lists 
are set in this noble tournament ; a fair field is open ; 
the Judge throws down his warder ; leap, holy knights, 
to the conflict, and God defend the right ! 

Not what we profess, but produce, is the test. Dis- 
senters from Calvinism were told. Yours is a good 
religion to live by, but not to die by. That is all we 
want. We do not expect to die^ yet are willing the 
case should be settled by what are called death-beds. 

We must have, theologians tell us, a revelation of 
God ; as though he were hid in his works. Are 
Shakspeare, Raphael, Beethoven so hid? Creation is 
God's transparency, not screen. Goethe's earth-spirit 
weaves the garment we see Him by. This veiled 
Deity reminds one of the coarse preacher's figure : 
God is like a squirrel in the wall ; he can see you 
though you cannot see him. So says not that man 
of no Christian birth or breeding, the Hindoo, Chun- 
der Sen, — a pearl of Orient piety welcomed by the 
leaders of a dozen religious sects, from Martineau the 
Rationalist to Dean Stanley of the Established Church. 
The wisdom has been queried of letting into our pul- 
pits this illuminated heathen, whom Jesus would have 
taken to his arms. Well if our liturgies, or prayers 
without book, could touch the rapture of this latest of 
the Magi from the East ! 

What a Radical is Nature ! See the plants, from a 
mixture of sun and rain, start in a thousand stretches 
of greenness to make a garden of the globe, their 



RADICALISM. IO5 

clinging to the root not hindering their airy ascent. 
Abide as it will in the ground, no dead past for the 
tree. It scatters in autumn the leaves it will not 
reclaim in spring. What cares the orchard for last 
year's apples and pears, forgotten in preparation of 
the new crop ? No merit made of the heaps of twenty 
seasons falling ruddy and yellow from the boughs ; no 
expectation of being saved by the old works, but only 
by grace of the new : the yield on the branches a 
transformation of the vital juice from beneath the soil. 
What a Conservative that barren fig-tree, occupying 
the room of its betters ! But blasting or burning is the 
doom of what does not bear. 

Development not allowed, revolt, revolution, will 
come. The workman's proverb, " Steady by jerks," 
is illustrated by how many a crisis in the world. 
Causes, says Bjornson, have to be repeated many 
times ere the explosion we call an effect. Witness 
the downfall of France from its long diet, not of duty, 
but of glory. Grown-up pre-occupants insist we 
shall act on their conscience and will. We cannot 
abide our own children contradicting us, as, with a 
mite of spirit, they will. Things degenerate till, as 
Goethe says, the gods will not recognize the sire's 
features in the faces of the sons. But the true Con- 
servative will thank Goth or German who restores the 
type of a religion run down. 

As all conception is covered, and none can tell just 
where Anti-Slavery, Woman's Rights, the Sanitary 
Commission, Etherization, Steam, or the Telegraph, 
began, it is hard to trace the genesis of Radicalism. 
Its germ, dot or double-dot, is as obscure as that origin 



I06 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

of man which mortgages another century for its de- 
cision. As the new planet may have several simulta- 
neous discoverers, so with the dawn of an idea. Real 
originators resign in favor of the Spirit. Always there 
is engineer and brakeman : always driving-wheel of 
the thinker, the safest of men ; the danger being from 
some stone of ultra-conservatism on the track. 

But what occasion, in the little band of Liberal Chris- 
tians, had any but to keep the peace, instead of show- 
ing teeth to bite their cherry in two? Paul blames 
Peter for conforming. Yet in a signal instance how 
Paul himself conformed ! Why could not we conform ? 

The first radical motive was the law of truth. When, 
six years ago, the churches were invited to send to the 
first Unitarian Convention, in New York, delegates 
authorized to represent their convictions, and pledged 
to pay great respect to the decisions of that body, we 
protested against such putting of personal and congre- 
gational freedom under threat. It seemed insincere to 
confound diverse opinions in the one stripe, which 
chosen messengers might hold out for a banner. We 
w^ere told. You will stand alone and wear motley. 
We said. Better Joseph's coat of many colors than 
the prison-uniform. We prefer citizens' or soldiers' 
to policemen's dress. An officer of the steamer Lex- 
ington^ escaping on a cotton-bale, told the court when 
the fire covered the deck he thought it a case. So did 
we, when a synod appeared as the precipitate from 
the solution of independent thought. It was time to 
be a martyr or witness-bearer. 

But another motive was the law of faith. We 
wanted to believe. We were accused of weakening 



RADICALISM. 



107 



the ranks. But the fellowship of honest dissent antic-, 
ipates wider sympathies, and enlarges the Church. 
When once, in Faneuil Hall, the constables tried to 
close the door against the crowd, the president cried 
out, Faneuil Hall is open ! However, for convenient 
concert, one end of Liberal Christianity might be shut, 
we meant the other end should swing ; and, at what- 
ever cost of house-warming, to keep open doors. 
Doubtless the articles assumed made a trig marching 
costume. The reports say that the number of believ- 
ers and churches has been rnultiplied b}- the platform 
and working plans of leaders so busy and brave. But 
what census shall give, beside the poll, the weight of 
those saved by the defended rights of reason ! How 
serious the secession, but for the victory of thinker 
over priest ! Would not our ship have been dis- 
masted, or unmanned and abandoned, or, amid waves 
of controversy, lacked seamanship to reach port, but 
for that modifying of the first stringency, which the 
new Protestants compelled? The rebels against hu- 
man leadership did good service ; the appellants to the 
higher law promoted justice ; the heretics preserved 
unity, and schismatics kept the faith. 

A third motive was the law of growth, erroneously 
supposed to come from hushing up differences. Sti- 
fling private judgment may yield mechanical Increase. 
A thoughtless huddling together in the rabbit-warrens 
of conformity makes the denominational count large 
and easy. Self-interest and gross social Instinct furnish 
a conglomerate or pudding-stone of assent. But the 
articulation of limbs or branching of a tree figures 
vital spread. Largeness is not greatness. An artist 



I08 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

was asked what should be the proper price of a certain 
picture measuring six by nine, — the amount of putty 
being the standard, not the painter's art. It is said all 
the boughs brought together would make a uniform 
bole ; but where then the green expanse, the lungs of 
leaves, the sap, blossom, and fruit? The tree were 
timber, without axe or saw ; and any sect that forbids 
outgrowth is a stick. Liberty reproached as dissolv- 
ing ties? It alone knits them. 

Mark now some illustrations. Cutting the old He- 
braism to graft in the Gentiles was as painful as to 
King George the Colonial Declaration. But it was 
good for Jewish as for English blood. Luther's attack 
on the Romish corruptions saved Rome, and gave the 
papacy a new lease, as uncapping the central fire keeps 
the earth from splitting ; beside that the volcanic up- 
heaval gathers the vapor into springs, laces the valley 
with streams, slopes the rocks to grind into intervals, 
and produces corn and wheat below, to laugh to the 
wind-flowers and nodding vines above. Another sort 
of rending makes the grandeur of history. Was 
Methodism in England the ruin of religion, or its ex- 
tension into new realms? Did Puritanism, driven from 
home or fleeing from the halter, waste one drop from 
the vials that hold the tears of the saints? Compare 
its commonwealth with the establishment that fears 
it can no longer wring revenue of royalty from the 
poor, but must stand on a footing with other orders, 
or come to the ground ! Did our doctrinal Fathers, 
forsaking Pilgrim Orthodoxy, destroy Congregational- 
ism ? These cases history vindicates. But, one radi- 
cal step more, we are among the breakers ; and Put 



RADICALISM. 



109 



about ship I is the cry. Hard aport ! sang the captain 
from the upper deck to the man at the wheel, as he 
steered in the fog, upon Cape Race, so near I saw the 
brown rocks bare with each retiring wave. In our 
theological ship, is the Free-thinker, advising a new 
course, going to cast us away? What pilot within 
hail but the candid student, who keeps abreast with 
science and does not stay behind to be petrified at any 
Salt Lake with Mormon leader or Mistress Lot? Our 
guides with their verbal basis broke the harmony they 
would bind. With but a touch, light as that at which 
the Touch-me-not bursts, scores of clergy and others 
met in private rooms, in Boston, to consult lest the 
ecclesiastical republic might receive harm. The press 
launched gibes at the improperly advertised movement 
as still-born. But it was a new and living generation, 
which the newspaper — sometimes generous, but ser- 
vant too much, not of man, but of the majority — ■ 
has come to respect. We always repent of going with 
the multitude. People are sorry for their senseless 
shouts and stupid throwing-up of caps. The denounc- 
ers become the accepters of ideas. Their assertors and 
martyrs behold the scoffer creeping into their ranks, 
and pretending he was always there. 

"The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side." 

The servile print grows polite, and begs to be reporter 
of that it had visited as abortionist. It is the old story. 
What to-day crucifies, to-morrow crowns. That first 
meeting, to which the parlors were open for fair play, 
became parent of the Free Religious Association and 
the Radical Chib. In their formation some of the 



no RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Radicals took no part, having no talent nor relish for 
machinery to act on the popular mind, deprecating a 
new sect, or dreading a hard concrete of their precious 
ideas. They loved free thought as an element, re- 
sented the appearance of a curb, coveted no personal 
publicity, and would not put their principles in any 
conventional gear. Religion is not only an institution, 
it is an inspiration ; and, in the necessary division of 
labor, some serve best where the electricity is gener- 
ated, leaving others to apply it to the fine or useful arts. 
Radical doctrine is needed less as a weapon or tool 
than a leaven in the yet heavy lump of this world's 
dough. 

But what is the Radical position? It is against any 
final wording. Unitarians still hold that in the Bible, 
the New Testament as supplement of the Old, the Di- 
vine mind is fully expressed, though they quote Rob- 
inson that " more light is to break out of God's Word." 
But we say there is more Word I As a sailing-master 
gives new directions every day, we must have fresh 
orders from the Navigator of our humanity, at each 
degree of the voyage. The old chart alone will not 
suffice. Can we find all we need, every coast and 
island laid down, on the sacred map? What specific 
rules does the volume hold for Liberty, Republican- 
ism, Temperance, Prohibition, Woman's Rights, Free 
Trade or Protection, War and Peace, Labor and Cap- 
ital, Poverty and Wealth? For every live question 
we do and must take counsel of the Spirit, as did Isaac 
or David, Noah or Lot. Which is the blasphemy, — 
to find their instructions insufficient, or to declare there 
are none for us? "Honor the king," says Peter. 



1 



RADICALISM. Ill 

What king do we honor? God is no linguist. He 
does not talk Syriac or Greek. At Pentecost, he was 
understood in every tongue because he used none, and 
no translation was needed of his speech. You give 
your dog the meat you have made him speak for, ris- 
ing on his legs. In the heavenly air our food is hung 
high for us to aspire. 

The Radical position is next against individual 
authority. Truth is God's note, needing no indorser. 
Jesus its authority.? It is his. Inspiration is not its 
warrant, but effect. Of all eloquence of pen or tongue 
it is cause. Christ's impersonation of it was his power. 
But it was not exhausted in him, more than the atmos- 
phere in one wind instrument. If in Scripture, the 
splendid score of the old masters, we read aught that 
does not chime with the string under God's finger 
in our breast, sweet as it sounded once, it is discord 
now. Corrupt birth, arbitrary choice, bloody atone- 
ment, hopeless woe, — is it between the sacred lids.? 
It grates on me no less, and I will reject it as quick 
as the last crudeness vented with impunity in this rash- 
speaking day. In any creature, son of God or son of 
man, no authority but the response of the spirit that 
rises to the Spirit that comes. 

The Radical protest is, once more, against any con- 
tradiction of science. To the constitution of Nature 
your religion must give way. This has got through 
the hair of our head in regard to Galileo, who, once 
alone against the Church, now has a unanimous vote. 
Lyell and Darwin may get such a verdict some day. 
To give man or the world a date of but six thousand 
years would, but for theologic imperception, appear 



112 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

as absurd as to make the sun a satellite of the earth. 
The doctors tell us, never was a man like Ruloff for 
thickness of skull. Suitable callipers might match it 
in many an ecclesiastic head. Sydney Smith told the 
dignitaries they had but to put their ]^ieads together to 
make the new wooden pavement for St. Paul's. The 
men, be they able as Agassiz, who assert, will have 
to scout a creation of man apart from other tribes. 
Religion above science is the eagle scorning the fowler, 
in the sky ; religion against science is the earthen pot 
clashing with the iron in the stream. 

But has Radicalism no principles? Yes: it denies 
to affirm, clears the way to trave-1, vetoes less than it 
signs, and tears down but to build. Its affirmation is, 
Spirit takes in all. My friend says. The Spirit is born 
of Christianity. I answer, Christianity of the Spirit. 
ELe says. Spirit is an abstraction. I say, A reality. 
He says. The gospel covers the ground. I reply, Nei- 
ther actual nor ideal. I stand within the Christian 
lines, the lowest private in those ranks. But I look 
out to the origin and end of the march. There are 
greater words than Christian, — the Divine Humanity, 
the image of God in the soul of man. 

The second principle is, forward character. Respect 
the past, we are told. Yes, and the present too ! The 
past is no bed to lie down on. Ancestral achieve- 
ments are abused for a lounge and easy-chair. Fore- 
going legislation had its place ; but, in this parliament 
of the world, what is the motion in order now ? Lay 
the next course. Better not have begun than stop. 
To bless is not to bolt, but tug at the load that tries 
our united strength. Not revolution, but evolution, is 



RADICALISM. II3 

benediction. Would that lesson were learned in 
France ! 

The third Radical principle is the perpetuity of the 
Church. Never was falser maxim than that religion is 
a thing between a man and his Maker. It is a bond 
betwixt men, as well as with God. Jesus prescribed 
no form ; and a generation passed without any binding 
outward order. The Church, like the world, is over- 
governed by base love of power. When one tries to 
rule me, I have a vision of thrones on which his pro- 
genitor was king or queen. Tyranny is the heritage 
of every sect. But the check of that great Italian 
water-wheel is felt in every denominational cog. The 
Church will survive, because it does not consist in any 
mode of discipline, but sympathy through every vary- 
ing statement and style. Uniformity is not unity, which 
liberty and law constitute, and law without liberty pre- 
vents. Centralization, with dominant will, passes 
before the dawn of local privilege with universal light. 
Architecture is one shadow of this on the dial. The 
cathedral, that overshadowed the town and nestled the 
population around its walls, as the fountain draws them 
in a Tyrolese village, dwindles. Though New York 
and Boston put up large edifices, these are but on a 
reduced scale, copies in pale ink of the ancient mag- 
nificence. No more structures like St. Peter's and 
Strasbourg, and the Duomo at Milan, long for such as 
Ruskin may ! Cologne, since most of us were born, 
remains, save on paper, unfinished, with some builder's 
crane on its tower for a sign. Palaces of shingles our 
bishops have to put up with. What is the temple to 
the traveller's road.? Theatres and railway-stations, 

8 



114 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

warehouse-blocks, dwellings of granite and marble, 
costly stones, gray and ruddy, in parks and reservoirs, 
outshine the modest audience-rooms mostly reared for 
Christian assemblies. What meeting-house can vie 
with river or ocean-steamer, or the hotels where we 
eat and sleep ? David might repeat his complaint to 
Nathan : " I dwell in an house of cedar, but the ark 
of God dwelleth within curtains." Is it all a mark of 
decay.? Rather that, in time to come, less ritual and 
more life shall compose the Church. Like its Head, it 
will triumph by going away. It will become Christian 
society. It will not, like the papacy, absorb, but be 
absorbed in the commonwealth. Conference and com- 
munion will take the place of throngs, excited or 
amused by some fine organ or famous voice. What- 
ever reaction entice the unthinking multitude to popish 
mimicry for a while, conversation will come, instead 
of that gallop of words called eloquence. But the 
Church will survive. Without her the reformer, who 
reproves her backwardness, would not have been. 
From the altar, where she too much kept the coals to 
warm her own hands, he has seized the brands to kin- 
dle every holy fire. Her insulter may behold his own 
blood in five generations of her priests. 

But she is not to stay a place for ceremony, empty 
and apart save once a week. Household affection, 
loyal friendship, honesty in affairs, justice to the 
/ laborer, fellowship with the poor, and example of 
temperance for a law, are the transformation wherein 
Zion's latter-day glory shall appear. From her Lit- 
urgy shall not the name, with the fact, of slavery drop ? 
No grain of humanity can she leave out. Those dig- 



RADICALISM. II5 

gers in the trench, along the dark wet tunnel, amid 
flaring lamps, her light must include. Employes, 
conductors, switch-men, brake-men, signal-men, ticket- 
sellers, draw-tenders, machinists, ought, as much as 
sailors, to have public sympathy, vacations from their 
task, and a Bethel of their own. How will their lack 
of science, religion, and sound morals, react on us ! 
Their eyes were wet when they were told, nothing but 
antique phrase kept their coming, with car and engine, 
as much as the tents of the patriarchs and ships and 
camels, into our prayers. This will be communion, 
and no longer protest. 

Radicalism means room. The old barns in the 
country were not built large enough to let the modern 
breed of horses in ; and my friend visiting me had to 
feed his team out of doors. The old churches were 
not built big enough to let the new men in. There is 
space for the body to sit down or lie prostrate, but not 
for the soul to stand up. The science, scholarship, 
culture, character, cannot be accommodated in the 
temple. I remember how the animals, that drew the 
families to church, used to graze on the juicy herbs 
round the sheds ; and it still seems to me a chafty 
nutriment parent and child tried to masticate within. 
Large-hearted, high-minded men and women, with 
their towering heads, have yet to resort to fodder in 
the field, not being able to get at the hay on the mow. 
What food we furnish is the test. What is their com- 
missariat? asked General Scott, when told the rebels 
were marching to Washington. Whether we touch 
the shadows of bread and wine in the supper or not, 
we must be communicant with God, to supply men. 



Il6 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

We flatter, brace, and backen ourselves on compliment, 
with mutual quotation and commendation, keeping a 
market of praise and running an exchange of vanity, 
instead of treating one another with verity and right. 

For Radicalism one virtue we may claim, sincerity. 
These men are not pretenders. To honesty they add 
ability, and often aptness to teach, which can ill be 
spared by the Church. We may have an equal won- 
der at what the pulpit welcomes, and what it excludes. 
We can think of one with a genius for piety like that 
of the Hebrew David, whose line he stands in, and a 
voice of electric speech, yet under the ban because 
miracle is to him mythology, and he cannot believe a 
troop of angels sang over Bethlehem. He writes a 
book of " American Religion," humorously by a critic 
called an asteroid in comparison with the " Ten 
Great Religions " from another hand, which are re- 
lated to it rather as mammoth and mastodon are to 
man. Another, under the ecclesiastic taboo, is an 
author, of national fame, soldier and leader of a black 
regiment in the civil war, advocate of every philanthro- 
pic reform, treating every question with alarming can- 
dor and wit. A third, a master of every liberal art, poet 
and philosopher, on all subjects a catholic, comprehen- 
sive, unpartisan judge, may be found like Levi, sitting 
at the receipt of custom. A fourth, too true to trim, 
and as unable to purchase place with sacrificing a 
grain of frankness as an old martyr with a pinch of 
frankincense in the fire of Jupiter, shall be content to 
read the proofs when he might furnish better matter 
for the press. But the inward panorama is lighted 
with a score of such in the social circle, respected by 



RADICALISM. II 7 

no organized power, yet drawing looks of reverence 
and love. Two appear in singular contrast : one ac- 
cepting Jesus, and rejecting Christ ; the other a devotee 
of Christianity, and indicting its reputed author. The 
free thinker, of however different shade, is scared with 
being told he will be classed with them ; as if he were 
looking after his classification, not the truth. 

But shall we allow such men to be heard, or put 
them down? If Jesus were the man I take him for, 
he would permit the sharpest interrogation of his 
claims. I honor my Master too much to defend 
him with any ostracism. He that with equal patience 
and plainness confronted hypocrites, and wanted 
Thomas the sceptic to put his hand into the wound, 
is no example for muzzling inquiry, or thrusting it from 
our side. The empire which professed to be feace^ 
with its censorship of the pen, ended in war ; and the 
tongue we bridle in others we shall ourselves be run 
away with. Do we give dignity to the pulpit by cov- 
ering it with restrictions removed from the press ? It 
is unsound flesh that shrinks from being touched. 
There is something rotten in the Denmark that fears. 
Courage to pursue every study, with hospitality to the 
results of investigation, is the flag of faith. Until it 
appears that church-men or creed-men make the best 
men^ are more gracious neighbors, live by a higher 
law than legality, or bring up their children to be 
more modest and respectful than those of other par- 
ents, we may believe it possible still, as with Saul, to 
be bred after the most straitest sect of our religion a 
Pharisee. While so many use form as a Sunday 
cushion for their mind, or put dogma instead of fidelity 



.Il8 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

into contracts, and the old rule lasts of knowing a man 
by his fruits, let us give Liberal and Radical a fair 
chance at the tribunal of worth. We cannot let the 
candidates be umpires too ; but, as we choose arbitra- 
tors of national claims, leave it to mankind, God's rep- 
resentative, to judge of all men. The verdict at last 
is just. 



V. 

THEISM. 

IT is a fact, meriting reflection, that the word which 
has been most hateful to rehgious people is Deism, 
or a belief in God, so direct through his instant care 
as to make small account of special revelation. Was 
it from a kindly wish not to irritate this sore of old 
prejudice, that by the name Theism, of equivalent 
sense, the same sentiment returning after generations 
is now baptized.'* Who was, of theists, the chief but 
Jesus .'' Who but Christians should be deists above all 
believers beside ? That a synonym for infidelity should 
be found in either term may imply in those who gave 
or bore it some share of a common fault. If one 
party underrated the written gospel, the other too 
much disparaged the universal light. It is possible to 
blaspheme not only a visible rite, but the interior soul, 
that temple without which is no sanctity in all the 
gold of prophetic wonders and words. Shall we 
brand as a sceptic the man who wishes no particular 
mediator, he confides in his own Author so immediately 
and much ? For what comes any seer but to revive 
the sense of Deity, and work the miracle of resurrection 
on no dead body, but our buried faith in that Being so 



I20 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

indwelling and surrounding, nothing and nobody can 
come betwixt him and us — as the old story tells us none 
did betwixt Enoch and him? We hear of atheists. 
But atheism is impossible. Without God, man were 
not. There are only atheistic theories which we 
touch, by summoning the witnesses. 

The first is Nature, by which we mean a certain 
whole, or unity. The world is not all in pieces, but 
all together. For convenience, we talk of this thing 
or that as distinct ; but separate or separable nothing 
is. There is no such thing as a things but every thing 
is part of something and of every thing else. This 
relatedness makes all one, hard as it is to define the 
relationship. We are taught in childhood boundaries 
on maps, and so fix in mind an artificial notion of 
dividing-lines which God never made. 

" Line in Nature is not found." 

There are no exactly measurable degrees of space or 
time, latitude or longitude. We name for practical 
purposes gross quantities which do not square with 
the fineness of the facts. But in their faith or unfaith 
men are fooled with words. One says. If the truth 
should turn out there is no God, we must abide man- 
fully the result. But God is the Truth you imagine 
requiring you to deny him. He is the Truth you set 
out from, as he is that you reach. God and Truth are 
both dictionary words. What right to define them 
differently, or make Truth the larger of the two ? The 
atheist says. No God distinct from Nature. I answer, 
No Nature distinct from God. What beside Deity is 
this entire and infinite simplicity we mean when Na- 



THEISM. 121 

ture is pronounced ? It is alive. A dead unity we can- 
not conceive. Death is dissolution into disconnected 
particles or parts. But, as no such absolute discon- 
nection can be, death but seems, and is not. You say 
matter, I spirit ; you, that spirit is finer matter ; I, that 
matter is coarser spirit. It remains for us both to find 
what substance is, since two substances cannot coexist. 
That all phenomena blend in unity is the point science 
arrives at more clearly every day. 

"The world 's mine oyster 
Which with knife I '11 open ; " 

but the point of cleavage neither Positivist nor Meta- 
physician finds. In Nature's armor is no joint a spear 
can pierce. Is God supernatural ? Then he is lim- 
ited ; for here is something called Nature no eyes ever 
saw the end of, and no terms of human conception 
can exhaust, from which he is cleaned out and con- 
fined to quarters, like a monk in a convent, nun in 
a cloister, or student ordered not to go oflf the college- 
grounds. Shall we tell him, as we do a child, to 
make himself small, or lie on his own side.? " God is 
a definite idea," said that great scholar and masterly 
writer, Andrews Norton, in reply to the supposed 
pantheism of Schleiermacher represented by George 
Ripley. But, open the box of your logic, he has es- 
caped ; as well set a trap for the light. " Lo ! God is 
here," we sing in the temple ; and many think of him 
as an unseen priest haunting the church, or huge an- 
chorite, like Simon the pillar saint. Yet, outside at 
the corner of the village meeting-house, or on deck 
when the Sunday praise gushed through the cabin- 



122 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

windows with organ accompaniment of the winds and 
waves, I have worshipped him as devoutly as any that 
sat and sang within. My friend, who went with me 
to the mighty sea-beat rocks, whistled some light tune. 
I could no more have done it than in the cathedral- 
choir, where, in Dresden as in Boston, I heard the 
operatic airs intrude. 

God is held holy and apart: that is finite. He 
is holy in the sense of wholeness and health. The 
loss of wholeness, any nerve or organ acting on 
its own account and setting up for itself, is disease. 
iVll secession is sickness in the body politic or animal 
frame. When one said Beauty of Holiness in a plea 
for art and the art-museum, a clergyman replied. Yes, 
but Holiness of Beauty we cannot say. Indeed, will 
not the equation work both ways ? Gross notion of 
Beauty in which it will not ! Handsome to the eye 
of flesh, but beautiful no impure thing or person can 
be. David saw the omnipresence forcing him to feel, 
if there were any bed in hell he could lie down on 
without God for his fellow, his adoration and its object 
were gone ; and Adam's fancy, that he could hide from 
the Lord among the trees of the garden, showed the 
short-coming of his apprehension, which made the 
Divinity but a larger man. The Infinite cannot suffer ; 
and his necessary blessedness is proof that my sin, 
pain, compunction, is no solid, but surface, — a shadow 
not, as theologians so monstrously describe, to last for- 
ever, but pass away, having served the ends for which 
it was sent. We err, do wrong, answer for it, and are edu- 
cated by it. Our iniquity becomes our grim minister, 
our folly a glorious benefactor. But we can do noth- 



THEISM. 



123 



ing against the will of Gocl ; for independent wills 
were breaks in Nature, with which the sublime totality 
we call Spirit were not. The doctrine of convertible 
species absolves itself of atheism, which lies rather in 
the opposite view of faults and blank intervals in the 
world. In the gaps no God could be ; and if there be 
aught where he is not, he is not at all. 

The next witness is Instinct, — a desire or direction 
animating Nature to suggest the same living unity at 
heart as in every point. This principle is identical, in 
however diverse creatures or things. The ant I saw 
dragging a grain of sand, as important to its hill as the 
Column Vendome to Paris, and his brother pulling 
along over the gravel the carcass of a blue-winged 
moth ; the bee in his hive or flower, or on a bee-line 
between ; the toad or turtle basking in the sun on a 
rock ; the bird and butterfly ; the dog and deer ; the 
fish and fox ; man and woman, — all have this common 
quality we call Instinct. The little one that runs to 
me with a smile and kiss before it can speak, and the 
dumb beast that licks my hand or rubs its fur on my 
foot, are acting from the same impulse and doing the 
same thing. On one parallel child or animal pushes 
or runs. I cannot distinguish between the heifer's 
horns and the baby's doubled-up fists. Does this prop- 
erty stop with what we call sensitive existence ? When 
we speak of somebody's monkey-tricks ; when a man 
is called a snake in the grass or a bear, or one woman 
is called a lioness and another a cat, and we are told 
to beware of their teeth and claws, for they scratch 
and bite with words, — we feel a disgust at carrying 
humanity so low. But we must take it lower still. 



124 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Must I not feel that the plant, creeping toward the 
light, is a type of my groping my way faster, but with 
less certainty of direction, out of the same cellar ? The 
roots spreading after water under ground, that have 
been known to pierce through the decaying wood of a 
conduit for a drink, imitate my seeking in a thirsty 
land for a finer river. Plants that shrink from touch 
are prefigurations of the nervous system, and mimic 
the maidens withdrawing their hands from a too bold 
or eager grasp. The fertilizing pollen shows vegetable 
sex. For the mutual attractions of human beings and 
chemical atoms we use the same word, affinity^ — as in 
Goethe's wondrous story of " Elective Affinities," and 
Miss Shepherd's of " Counterparts," and a whole class 
of literature back to Plato's Ideas. The electric fluid 
loves iron so that it will run on a wire beneath the bot- 
tom of the deep : Jesus resembles to it the coming of 
the Son of Man ; and some scientists suspect it to be 
the element of thought. No brain without phosphorus, 
says the physicist ; and advises the student to a diet of 
fish for strength to swim and cleave the depths of his 
ethereal sea. No inertia that instinct does not bore 
or dive into, or come up through, to breathe. All the 
faculties of the mind — causality, comparison, memory, 
imagination, constructiveness, and music — act from 
instinct. It is the first form and matrix of divine inspi- 
ration. According as a man draws from books and 
systems, learning and recollection, instead of this liv- 
ing spring, he lacks or loses power, and drops from 
eloquence and pathos into oratory and recitative. 
What this quality is we cannot fathom or circum- 
scribe. Microscopy and analysis detect it in the 



THEISM. 125 

rhythm of the particles of a bar of steel and of a stone, 
as a universal nature, which is another name for God. 
It is one tune and many variations, like " Home, Sweet 
Home," through endless travesties of the pianist, — an 
unsearchable essence, an innumerable sum. 

The third witness is Character, which, whoever pos- 
sesses, knows he never created, but only, like the block 
under the etcher, yields himself obediently to receive. 
No virtuous man takes the credit of his own virtue. 
It is no manufacture of the mind, but a product and 
projection from behind the will, use whatever subor- 
dinate shaping we may to fit the case and circum- 
stance : " And this not of yourselves ; it is the grace of 
God." In proportion as my good behavior is my pri- 
vate intention, conscious of its charm or able to reckon 
its merit, it is at fault. It is beautiful, only as ascribed 
to the Sovereign Command. Jesus claimed no glory, 
for it cost him no struggle to cast off Satan. Think 
not to pay me for the service I render you ! Your pay- 
ment is an injustice and offence. Render a service to 
somebody else. Pass, as Franklin said, the favor on. 
I am a mere agent. I do the King's bidding, like one 
of the soldiers of that old centurion, who could figure 
Jesus only as captain of a troop before which diseases 
fled. Render your dues to the one Author, whom all 
channels of benefit and mercy represent. How ridicu- 
lous this complaint of people's ingratitude for your 
help and kindness ! Are you the source of their ad- 
vantage ; or did you communicate it for recompense, 
as a hired servant that grumbles because he has to 
wait and dun for his wages ? Are you owner of the 
house, carriage, or garden you invite them into ? Your 



126 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

demand to be paid likens you to the Roman proconsul 
who embezzled the provincial fee on its way to the im- 
perial treasury. Are you charitable ? It is God's pity 
in you. From his winking at the times of " this igno- 
rance " your lids learn to drop, while lynx-eyed pursuit 
of any sin is worse than the sin. 

" Be to their faults a little blind." 

There is an imperceptiveness finer than any sight. 
How men are hit with the pistol they wear and whip 
they flourish ! Censure is the edge-tool which he that 
handles cuts himself with. Judgment and righteous- 
ness are a line and plummet nothing in the world can 
bear to meet. Governments are not carried on, taxes 
collected, houses and railways built, or any machine 
run with perfect rectitude. Demand ideal purity, and 
the wheels stop. The pump has to be fetched, says my 
friend, with dirty water ; though it would seem as if 
New York had used too much ! In business-dealings 
with my fellow-men I find a certain per cent of corrup- 
tion. But I am too busy to stop. I cannot consume 
the day with question of every particular ; it were an 
expense of nerves more precious than money. I am 
guilty if I let the community suffer so ? But I suffer 
wrong rather than suffer myself. The Spirit bids me 
let off*, and not sentence many a criminal. 

How such compassion, returned for v^rong, abounds 
among the purer sex ! Therefore Goethe, their truest 
modern delineator, says : — 

'*The eternal womanly draweth us on." 

In whatever calamity or folly, it is always some 
woman's hand outstretched to take us up. Lady is 



THEISM. 127 

bread-2"iver. vShe that blamed us when we throve 
will feed and tend our hunger and disease. Every 
man has been a Mungo Park without travelling. This 
is the crown of the queen. No woman has reached 
supreme merit in song or story, policy or art. It was 
said of an able woman, if it had pleased the Lord to 
drop her spirit into the pantaloon she would have been 
a great general. But what match would Elizabeth of 
England or Joan of Arc have been for Cromwell or 
Napoleon? Yet, as organs of Divine forgiveness, we 
have a thousand women for one man. I do not wonder 
when the Catholics desire Heaven's mercy they call 
on the Virgin for her prayers. 

All great character is the flow of Divine love and 
justice through the human soul. Looking at Niagara, 
an eminent statistician said, There is power to turn all 
the machinery in the world. But does not the gazer 
at that green tide feel the force of a mightier flood be- 
hind his smallest act of right? " My usual weight is 
a hundred and forty pounds," said the countryman; 
" but when I am mad it is a ton." There are no limits to 
the sacred rage for equity. Not by wealth or numbers, 
but its cause. Union beat Secession. " We have figured 
out this sum," said the slaveholder to Mr. Garrison, 
" and are sure to prevail." " It would seem so ; only you 
have omitted one thing, that is God," was the reply. 
When the civil war broke out, and boys under age ran 
away to enlist and fling themselves in the Dragon's 
mouth, a joyful sacrifice for liberty and the land, was it 
their own will, or something that took it captive as a 
tool for its majestic design, and made a paradise for 
them of the field of death ? A true spiritualism, not 



128 



RADICAL PROBLE]>,IS. 



that which is but the sensuality of the spiritual world, 
nerved their arms. Their motive was not a thought 
of any shiny place they were going to, but conscious 
glory of the spot they were in. Virtue or duty is ever 
such heavenly joy ; all notion of reward is foreign to 
it. Samuel J. May hardly expected his translation 
would. make him happier. " I may," he said, "have 
clearer vision, but not more confiding faith." The 
saint only asks to be permitted to continue to feel and 
love as he does already. Dr. Tuckerman declared his 
idea of eternal bliss was fulfilled in his ministrations 
to the poor. When one dilated on Christ's anguish 
for man's deliverance, Charles G. Loring answered, it 
was his privilege to think Jesus the happiest man that 
ever lived. What a superstition that he was crushed 
by the penalty of sin of millions dead or unborn ! Did 
that wine of the Passover, that water of the Samaritan 
well, or that corn rubbed in his disciples' hands, have 
no refreshment or flavor in his mouth ? Was not the 
meat, they knew not of, a feast which no funeral of 
earthly life or comfort could offset? My neighbor's 
delight in feeding his own horses, the little girl's in 
tolling the fishes, the minister's who has bread of God's 
word to dispense, needs no supplement of supernatu- 
ral touch. The disembodiment we call death cannot 
make it more celestial. God recompense it with palms 
and harps and crowns, gold pavements and streets of 
pearl? It reminds one of the Oriental prayer : " Have 
mercy, O Lord, on the bad ; for Thou hast done every 
thing for the good in making them so ! " My inclina- 
tion to make a sacrifice of time, talent, pleasure, or 
life, is a gift from him too great for aught else as pay- 



THEISM. 



29 



ment or equivalent to be possible. Let others spend 
their immortality surveying the precious stones of the 
New Jerusalem ! We w^ill sell every share in that city 
for new commissions in the war against woe and sin ; 
and not covet, in comparison with the service we en- 
list for to the end, even the wine the Master told his 
followers he was to drink new with them in the 
Father's kingdom. 

This disposition, not created by, but breathed into 
us, is witness of God. The carver at his table, though 
eating no morsel, has the best portion, as the most 
blessed and enviable person at the board is the host, 
who divides all his dainties among his guests. Here 
is a quality which no politic contrivance or utilitarian 
experience, no calculation of carnal solace to revenge 
temporary abstinence, and no generalization of remote 
selfish benefits of any sort, can account for. It is pos- 
itive life of that Infinite One whose own joy is com- 
munication, and to imitate whom alone makes us 
communicants. 

The great achiever is never wilful, but possessed. 
In wilfulness the will of God or man were lost. The 
great are conscious of destiny : what they mean is 
meant in them. Napoleon had a star ; Jackson swore 
by the eternal splendor ; Lincoln waited on Provi- 
dence, and would not force events. Called coward by 
the impatient, killed for a tyrant because slavery owned 
in him its^most dangerous foe, branded as a compro- 
miser by reformers conscientious but unwise, — when 
he died, and the lots were cast for what he left, his 
coat also was found woven without seam ; for no high 
phrase, extreme ground, radical or doctrinary extrav- 

9 



130 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

agance, can compare with the character, which is 
God's fitting such a man to his purpose, — as he was 
so conspicuously to whose cradle the Magi were led 
at Bethlehem, and who will survive all his critics, new 
or old. 

The fourth witness is Art, the expression of truth in 
the form of beauty, be it what it may we call beauti- 
ful, — picture, sculpture, music, or manners ; for, take 
whatsoever shape, without inspiration it is not art. 
Poem or painting, wholly explainable into the maker's 
dexterity, is not art, but artifice. The part that could 
not be calculated or foreseen, in your grace or elo- 
quence, which was the escape of God, where your 
pen like the Spiritualist's pencil was guided ; the slip 
of your tongue ; the point while you climbed you were 
raised into ; that of which you knew not and the artist 
knew not, and no theory can clear up how it was done ; 
which baffles as it delights, — is the interesting and im- 
mortal portion. In the composer's company you are 
lifted off* your feet because he was. In Retzsch's en- 
graving of a scene in Homer, the deceased hero is 
borne to glory by angels. So, when touched by any 
performance, we are exalted with singer or speaker, 
and tread on air. A bit of canvas, on which genius 
has put its mark, can no longer be measured by the 
foot-rule. A visitor of Rubens's Descent from the 
Cross, being told it was time to go, answered, " Wait 
till they get him down ! " Who has not seen how 
leagues of land and water, hill and sea-beach, could 
be brought by faithful color within a narrow frame, 
and the universe of earth and sky opened to our glance 
by a few happy strokes of the brush.'' As Madame 



THEISM. I^r 

Guyon was elevated by religious transport from the 
ground, as Mr. Hume in his trance ascends to the 
ceiling, so we go up, unaware that we rest below, see 
afloat by the magic of genius in an ether of joy. 
Raphael is said to be the only one who can make his 
angels look natural in mid-heaven, and absolve them 
of gravitation. Does he not make us, soul and body, 
just as light .f* The artist in his rapture heeds not laws 
of Nature in any mechanical sense, balks at no diffi- 
culties that make materialists halt, but revels in mir- 
acle. No impossible wonder of the storj' gives him 
pause. Paul Veronese makes the wine run red at 
Cana in his incomparable sketch ; Raphael fetches 
dow^n Moses and Elias to witness the Transfiguration ; 
Schaefter shows the hapless lovers in their penal whirl ; 
and Allston displays Samuel rising to Saul at the 
Witch of Endor's incantation. What is the ecstasv 
which the cold canvas can impart after generations 
have gone, and the ideas are obsolete from which it 
took its cue ? There must be in it a hint of truth which 
physicists do not suspect. All the spiritualism is a 
hound after reality more precious than protoplasm or 
animal derivation of men. Artists are not atheists, 
however artisans may be. They are possibly not 
church-members, Sabbatarians, or liturgists ; but they 
are believers and worshippers. A spirit passes before 
them, as before Job. There is a moment or place in 
their task where, in the Orthodox phrase, they know 
they are assisted. It is no flag fleshly appetite can 
plant on the celestial coast. It is what on their voy- 
age a holy vision wins. This, with Jesus, was the 
transcendent bliss. Disparage not art : he was artist ! 



132 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

From no such official or wretch as the popular theol- 
ogy misfashions could have come the spoken music 
of those parables and sermons, conversations and 
prayers. Such sentences of solace and benediction 
were moulded by lips that had exquisite sense of the 
melody of words. Was there art in Plato's philoso- 
phy or Homer's lines ? Put his periods beside any of 
theirs. The ring is as true, the tone as sweet, the 
rhythm as complete, while the matter is more mo- 
mentous and sublime. Verse-wright or logician many 
a one, but no teacher without Divine breath. 

Does it shock piety to couple art with the Saviour of 
the world ? Who but the world's Maker is the supreme 
artist? His works are beautiful persons and immortal 
souls. Art is man's nature, and man's nature is the 
art of God. Manners are an art as much as tinted 
cloth or carved stone. The gracious element will flow 
into every various act and motion, as the same fountain 
has man}^ jets. We hear of eminent creators grouty 
and inaccessible, like Turner ; and of poets and phil- 
osophers being taken suddenly ill, and jumping into 
bed when callers were announced. But it was to avoid 
the intrusion of reporters and insolence of gossips. 
There is a rudeness gentlemen must use to the im- 
pertinent, a shell sensibility exudes, a chevaux-de-frise 
the tender heart sets up against unjust fault-finding or 
unwarranted approach. But without inward grace is 
no insurance of courtesy even in the feminine frame. 
Such arrant rebels were the women of the South, Gen- 
eral Butler must print something about she- adders at 
his office-door ; and in both the French Revolutions a 
special fury seized on women more than men. From 



THEISM. 133 

the genuine artist, politeness, on whoever has capacity 
to receive it, w^ill flow. William Blake, treating the 
companion of his walk with rare deference, had, with 
second-sight, still loftier salute for St. Paul passing 
them on the way. This magnificent style depends on 
no prim particulars of elaborate study. I can think of 
an artist, who may smoke, dance into all the positions 
of an acrobat, wear a cap in your presence, use exple- 
tives to pious folk profane, with such overrunning 
good-will in every look and gesture to his pupils and 
peers, — keeping no secrets of his skill, but telling every 
thing, as a scholar said he left his manuscripts open for 
all on his table ; and giving to each comer alternately 
a piece of his mind and a piece of his heart, expend- 
ing with reckless profusion his vitality in good advice ; 
drawing smiles and tears alike with his pencil and his 
tongue, and setting everybody astir with his voice as 
with the drummer-boy from his brush, — that no one 
shall say where the authentic art begins or ends. That 
such a man, moved unwittingly by something greater 
than his exceeding wit, should deny God, were as if 
the finger denied the brain. I have come to see your 
possessions^ was said to a land purchaser, who an- 
swered, I own none of these acres : I am a possession 
myself. 

In all art we take example from God. " All the 
world 's a stage," writes Shakspeare. It is also a pic- 
ture, which the Author leaves us to finish. It is a col- 
lection, the best in which we are puzzled to decide. 
From admiring the tawny lion we are diverted by the 
shining bug. Our eye is taken with the frowning cliff, 
but taken off* by the billow dashing at its base ; and 



134 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

again soon forgets the foamy rush, to be absorbed in 
the long stretch of noiseless flats clothed in green and 
yellow by the retiring tide. When paint is added to a 
boarded house, it is like covering a lank frame with 
generous flesh and blood. But God leaves the world 
no skeleton. How Nature hastens to heal every gash 
of coulter or carriage, or cannon-wheel ! People take 
glasses to inspect the details of a landscape by Church, 
or battle-piece of Le Brun. How do they compare 
with the shadings on the back of a turtle, scales of a 
fish, neck of a dove, or wing of a fly.? We say of a 
well-adorned creature, it is beautifully marked. The 
fierce leopard, prowling panther, stealthy cat, cum- 
brous cow, slow ox, are designed and drawn as if God 
could let nothing mean or savage drop from his hand 
without his signet, as a painter writes his initials on 
his least sketch. 

" Did He who made the lamb make thee?" 

writes Blake of the tiger. Yes, answers the soft dec- 
oration, supple motion, glittering eye. Divine intent 
in lavish charm is here, as in the meek ball of wool. 
How the spell for the population, of caravans and 
menageries, vindicates the wild beast we think fit only 
to exterminate ! Are not the animals themselves artists, 
into whom a taste for beauty descends? Watts writes 
of the bee, — 

" How skilfully she builds her cell! 
How neat she spreads the wax ! " 

No, says the theologist ; nothing but instinct. But 
wiser science discovers voluntary intelligence ; and we 
find that birds alter and adapt their nests as men their 



THEISM. 135 

dwellings to new situations. Are not the modulations of 
their songs, too, learned and enriched by degrees, — one 
note or trill, in successive ages of these winged citizens, 
joined to another? Surely the lark, thrush, linnet, and 
nightingale, are not deaf as a flute or hand-organ to 
their own melodies. They are no wood-work of dumb 
show to entertain us, but have something of the feeling 
of Braham or Malibran in their breasts, some organ of 
tune in their tiny brains, and appreciation of harmony. 
They must despise the senseless screams that pass in 
some of our parlors and churches for secular or sacred 
music. They sing and play more true than many 
choirs and organists. They are their own composers, 
and have no Mozart or Beethoven to give them the 
score. Is not their nerve and faculty the Lord's com- 
position, part of the music of the spheres? The art 
that is God's exercise is his demonstration too. " He 
has made every thing beautiful in his time ; " and, how- 
ever our modern Orthodoxy may note exceptions, if 
there be a Hell, I doubt not that is handsome too. 

The last witijess is Experience. Everybody comes, 
like FalstafF, to need God, — One eternally alive to suc- 
cor and befriend. I cannot quite credit the professions 
of entire content, with which, looking cmly to annihila- 
tion, some lay their offspring in the dust, and have 
their own coffins made. It is a cheerless belief, or dis- 
owning of faith, that no God makes his rendezvous in 
the human breast, or becomes conscious of himself in 
his children's mind. When we go down into depths 
beneath the sun and air, not to find him were madness 
and despair. He is there to bring us up, like divers 
with pearls in our hands. There are cases in which 



136 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

no man can redeem his brother. Mortal or angelic 
help will not avail. Something the soul must have for 
its rehance : one cannot lean on himself. Who does 
not feel the pathos of the situation when Rip Van 
Winkle says his dog is the only friend he has left ! But 
there are extremities wherein no friend in sight will 
suffice. The Invisible Almighty we want. If some 
other, as Jesus, the Virgin Mother, or Guardian Angel, 
stand instead, it is but as his proxy to assure us of his 
pardon and support. Happy they who require no 
medium, attorney, or friend at court, being at home 
with the great Appointer and on good terms with the 
King ; able to say, like one when admonished to make 
his peace with God, " I am friends with him, and we 
have never quarrelled." 

We cannot rest in multitude, in the many. There is 
no single creature that is not many, of imperfect prin- 
ciples and inconsistent moods. " My husband," said 
a hopeless woman, " is hurt at what I did with the 
best purpose : I do not expect to please him in any 
thing." " I feel," said another, pointing as we sailed, 
" that I am that long, lonely island, looking over on 
other peoples' trees." But, in the sense of unity em- 
bracing the world, we are at peace. The doctrine of 
Spiritualism, held as of a swarm of spirits of all dis- 
positions, w^ithout Infinite Spirit, can only discompose. 
Such a Spiritualist wrote me, " Truth cannot prevail 
without the abolition of the Christian's God." Spirit- 
ualist and Atheist ! What a worse than Chinese 
puzzle this chaos and limbo of spirits, — 

"Black, white, and gray, 
With all their trumpery!" 



THEISM. 137 

The many only repeat the One, and are Impossible 
without it. Take away the mathematician's unit, and 
all his mighty calculations sink. Take away the real 
Unit, and the universe is no more. It is easy to call 
names, to brand as atheist him that believes not in 
your God, who may be finite, fetish, devilish. But 
discard the vital Unity to adopt the elements and par- 
ticles alone for your countless senseless fathers and 
mothers, and religion is the hypocrisy of an empty 
name. In the One only we repose, and meet any fate. 
A friend, dying of cancer in the throat, said : It is his 
will ; and I have so suited my mind to it that, should 
anybody come in and say, Alice, you are going to 
get well, I know not how I could bear that I 

We fondly trust each other, but no fellow-creature 
can bear our whole weight. We shrink from omnipo- 
tence, not knowing what it will do with us ; but the 
Almighty is all-tender. Among men, it Is not the strong 
that disturb us, but the weak. Strength of will and 
feeling raises and soothes. The feeble irritate and 
torment. The superficial chop-wave on the sea vexes 
and annoys and disquiets the sleeper as it dashes 
sharp and angry on the shore. But the ocean's ground- 
swell lifts skift' or frigate gently, and how silently, as 
an infant rises and falls on the mother's heaving 
breast. The resonant surge along the tremendous 
rocks, as mellow as it is mighty, is delicious unsatlating 
music, never tires the musing mind, hushes the weary 
frame in the soft resistless swing which sun and moon 
stand ready to push to and fro, is a pleasant accom- 
paniment of thought; and, with its rote in time, re- 
minds of the roll of eternity. The image is with me 



138 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

still of one whose eye-lids drooped, as by some pre- 
established harmony, with the regular dip of my oars 
on the slopes of the sliding, watery heaps. So on this 
slippery surface of time we are borne by a Providence 
we cannot fathom or withstand. The Power that is 
measureless can afford to be kind. 

" Hark to the voice of the mighty sea, 
Whispering how meek and gentle he can be." 

The shallow freshet, the brawling brook, cannot help 
being rough. O my brother or sister, precious are your 
regards ; but if, in sore distress, it is the mildest treat- 
ment I need, if my heart is wounded within me per- 
haps by your ill-considered word, then with David I 
call for mercy on Him. His hand is as much easier as 
it is greater. Nature is that hand, into whose hollow 
creep alike the bleeding soul and the stricken deer. 
His breath is more healing than any human speech : 
solitude is that breath. Thousands charm and cheer 
me, but One sustains. Without Him we are confused, 
dissipated, and dissolved. In his Being we are and 
cannot cease to be. 

But there are conditions of knowing God : first, 
intellectual. We call atheist the man who does not 
accept our definition. But we must see God, if at all, 
in his. act. We cannot part him from what he does, 
or between Creator and creation stick a thought. Once 
he was supposed too pure to soil his hands with 
making the world ; that he employed apprentices, or 
used for a proxy his Son ; or, if he constructed it as a 
carpenter and owned it as proprietor, like an absentee 
landlord he left it to run itself in certain grooves of 



THEISM. 139 

rule, while he took the air in some celestial Boule- 
varde, showing his hand occasionally to break his 
laws, playing a game of hide-and-go-seek with his 
creatures, and caught only in some marvel. The 
sacred hymnist prompted our thanks that we — 

" Are not left to Nature's light 
To know the Lord ; " 

as if an author could be published in aught but his 
works. God's revealing is in what theologians consid- 
ered his veil. Spinoza was counted atheist because 
he could see nothing but God ; as Novalis said, was 
drunk with him. Nature the wreck and ruin of a fall? 
No : his costume changed, summer or winter, every 
day. Peruse him in printed ink alone, when we turn 
the rock-pages of the globe, the album and picture-book 
for his children's amusement, containing not the seven 
wonders we read of in our primer, but showing all is 
such wonder-land where we live that nothing in par- 
ticular as a miracle can be distinguished and defined ! 
A good editor tells me my God is Brahma, because he 
is One I cannot get rid of or cut off' from myself. 
But I have never been able to pronounce his name. 

There is a moral condition of knowing him. A 
liar is atheist, conceiving only of some power he can 
circumvent. If you make partial, deceptive statements. 
I shall find out the missing links which Darwin hunts 
for in the earth's autobiography. How surely in every 
falsehood the Deity sees himself denied ! The duplic- 
ity of the Pharisees was their own blind which they 
could not see him through ; but his beauty shall break 
out all over you into eyes. The false reasons are not 



140 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

only insulting, but profane ; and whoever gives no such 
is rare and divine. Every deceiver imitates the ostrich 
with its head in the sand and its body out. My friend 
in the cars did not know how clearly I saw her unwill- 
ingness anybody should take the empty seat by her 
side. The moon eclipses the sun, and is eclipsed by 
a sixpence close to the eye ; and all double-dealing 
eclipses God. As criminals are described in adver- 
tisements, how we placard the uncandid on the inner 
walls ! They, and no theoretical atheists are without 
God. We can readily think of people who keep on 
their premises a pot of varnish and plenty of veneer. 
From the shop of their mercenary mechanics comes 
nought but superficial mimicry of value, — the excel- 
lence skin deep, the meanness a foot thick. Be mahog- 
any all the way through, if you would have your reli- 
gion pass for more than pretence. " Oh, that I knew 
where to find him ! " dost thou cry, O Job ? Find your- 
self in his service, which is justice to his creatures, and 
you will not miss him. For the man who gave to the 
Missionary Society the money he owed for his wood- 
bill, saying he must pay God first, that Being must 
have been hard and far to reach. Weave your dogma 
out of prophets' tongues, you will not catch him : put 
your fence of form never so high, you cannot impound 
his Spirit. He will stay only in the truth of your own 
lips and purity of your eye. He laughs at your creed 
like the morning at the prism in which you would ana- 
lyze and confine its beam. If he be not in your pur- 
pose, you can have him, like Greek or Jew, only round 
in spots. Your righteousness is the Real Presence. 
Theodore Parker over a sceptic's coflfin said, " O Lord, 



THEISM. 



141 



though he doubted thy being, he lived thy law ; " and 
all who had come to wonder what prayer could be 
uttered were convicted as less faithful than the man in 
his shroud. 

There are doubtless professors of atheism, idolaters 
of science like Vogt, carrying contempt of religion so 
far as to class the apostles with apes. Self-esteem in 
their brain fills the whole space reverence should share. 
A French Communist general, being asked if he be- 
lieved in God, answered, No ; and he would not toler- 
ate him if he did : it was one against many, a tyranny 
he would resist and erect the barricades in heaven, — 
feeling as Milton's Satan did about the God whom 
only " thunder had made greater." This was the 
insane anarchy washed out of the streets of Paris with 
the blood of sixty thousand men. The God that had 
been preached to them, of Calvinist and Jesuit, priest 
and cardinal and pope, undeserving his sceptre, was 
too like the earthly rulers whom liberty and brother- 
hood led them to withstand. " What, then," the 
French officer was asked, "do 3'ou believe in?" El- 
bow-deep in gore, " Universal Harmony," he replied, 
— with no Harmonist, only a tune as on a barrel-organ 
playing itself! No wonder a bar was set up for a trial, 
in which binocular, ambidexter, centipedal, believing 
Germany was appointed judge. Nevertheless, an ob- 
scure sense of right inspired that Commune, and every 
honest drop of blood shall have a resurrection. 

All science of the understanding God escapes. No 
microscope or telescope will ever discover him. A 
devout scientist, apologizing for his brethren, said, 
" They are too much occupied and tired with their 



142 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

specialties of investigation to entertain the subject of 
Deity." But is it not their method which for any- 
spiritual pursuit is at fault? 

There is, to know God, a spiritual condition. Is 
faith his communication to us or our unfolding to him ? 
He will impart himself in the ratio of our growth. 
Doctors tell invalids it will do them good to take deep 
inspirations of their own breath ; and travellers say 
they get no just impression of Niagara or St. Peter's 
till, by often gazing, they grow up to what they con- 
template. 

So with our seeking our source. All things help 
us. I found a teacher in the little brown bird filling 
the sky with its song from a throat no bigger than a 
straw. As I wrote in the field a heifer came up to me. 
I offered her some clover. She shook her head, did 
not want that. I stroked her forehead. She jerked 
her horns again : it was no cosseting she was after. 
She stood and looked as I drove my pen, and was but 
immensely curious to know what I was about there on 
her domain. What was the green worm crawling 
towards me along the walk but some bit of an old sin 
trying in it to lift its head from the ground? Every 
dumb creature is one round in an angel-ladder we 
mount on to God and heaven. The beast has no dread 
because no idea of death. Our ability to face and an- 
ticipate destruction is proof we are not to be destroyed. 
Your joyless outlook at annihilation, like the Indian 
death-song, refutes your doctrine of doom. With one 
glance at the universe we feel some One is happy, with 
whom we shall have a good time. Some of us de- 
bated, if shut up to the alternative, which we should 



THEISM. 143 

prefer, faith in God or in our own immortality. Let 
me go down, if only so he can remain eternal supply, 
to vanishing creatures, of dissolving views. But God 
were suicide if he killed himself in his children, mur- 
derer if he slew his children in himself, deceiver if he 
stirred expectations he must disappoint, robber if he 
waylaid us for any treasure of friendship, spurious 
benefactor if he snatched away what he had once 
bestowed. 

" Chip, chop, chain, 
Give a thing and take it back again ! " 

"Do you believe," one was asked, "in the devil?" 
" No : I believe in God." The man who doubts the 
reality of sin is held a pantheist. But he who regards 
sin as an essence is not a theist. Thought, which is 
imperative, and no respecter of persons, must charge 
him with being an atheist. Satan is agent and tool, not 
a chess-player saying Check to God. He is, and there is 
none else, — eternal equation of the universe. It is no 
subtraction, but seal of his infinity, that he can leave his 
own solitude and make persons in relation with him- 
self. Person of whom they are part, able to love and 
pray. Were the Divinity a single consciousness de- 
vouring as quick as it produced, it would be a helpless 
and futile force. Its power to differentiate, hinted in 
the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, is its 
own authentication. 

From the teachings of many churches and schools, 
we should suppose God's nature a collection of con- 
tradictory qualities, like those creatures which, though 
hostile, are caged together, to look askance and growl 



144 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

at each other ; living only in a sort of truce or armed 
neutrality. So he has to keep the peace in this quar- 
relsome family of his own inclinations. He compro- 
mises between them, is the great Compromiser. God 
is good ; but, we are told, forget not he is holy too, 
and that his holiness limits his grace. No ! his holi- 
ness expresses his grace. He is equally benignant 
whether he comfort or strike, as light and lightning 
are but the same. A Methodist said to a Calvinist, 
" Your God is my Devil." But we all have really the 
same God. The overseer on the plantation was an 
obsequious person to the owner, cruel to the slave, — 
wreathing his face with smiles, with a whip under his 
cloak. God turns a shining look on high and low. 
He has not given you up ! The writer in Genesis, and 
Paul in his Epistles, were mistaken and disrespectful 
in supposing he had failed with Adam and Eve. One 
described the virtue of a persevering ecclesiastical 
organizer as like the mill, once having grasped the 
log, not letting it go till it was turned to account of all 
its value. So God will never have done with us till 
we are converted to all we are good for. He will get 
the last drop of music out of us. Jesus was in error 
if he thought God had forsaken him. We remember 
the town-crier, who used to go round ringing his bell, 
and shouting, to inquire for some lost child, and set 
the whole population, on every wharf and by-lane, to 
hunting him up. I have known all the inhabitants in 
a village kept awake because some lad had not returned 
from the woods ; and large parties organized for the 
search. The meanest and worst is as dear to God as 
the one we call his Only-begotten. Parents are sup- 



THEISM. 



H5 



posed to have favorites ; but the good father or fond 
mother will never tell the pet of the house, however 
by look, act, or manner the secret be betrayed. They 
are ashamed of their partiality. God has no partiality 
to be ashamed of. No sublime personage, king or 
genius, profound philosopher or special messenger, is 
an inch nearer to his good-will, a hair's-breadth deeper 
in his embrace, than the humblest breather. 

God is the same in all ages and nations. We think 
he has some far-away Golden Age, like the com- 
mencement of the Christian era ; and the Jews put it 
still further back with Father Abraham. They appro- 
priated Jehovah, made a monopoly of the Lord, on 
that little strip of territory ; letting the heathen — 
Hivites, Jebusites, and the rest — have some poor little 
wretched deities, Moloch and Remphan, of their own, 
but no share in Him who thundered from the moun- 
tain, and had led them to Sinai through the Red Sea ; 
as the modern Chinese think all worship and civiliza- 
tion barbarous but their own. Almost all Christians 
fancy the Pagans under a curse, and not a few put the 
world's favored time eighteen centuries ago. To the 
question in the mental-photograph album, which is 
the last toy we play with. In what feriod would 
you have rather lived? they answer. When Christ 
was born. Those were the times of glory, when the 
star went before the wise men, and the annunciation 
came to Mary ; the angels sang over the cradle, the 
Holy Ghost descended as a dove, and in tongues of 
flame, and there were healings and feasts and resur- 
rections ! Now the age of miracles is past. But is 
God less manifest now than then } Was there formerly 

ID 



.1/^6 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

more of him in the world? Has he lost ground? 
Absurd, impossible, impious to presume ! What those 
wonders were we cannot exactly say, only that Jesus 
told his followers greater were to come ; and just as 
great now as ever. Where would you rather have 
lived ? in Bethlehem or Bethany or Jerusalem, rather 
than Boston? What illusion of false color through 
the kaleidoscope of history, the stained glass of imagi- 
nation, we turn on the Distant and the Past ! " Are 
you going to the Holy Land ? " said one to my friend. 
" No," he answered : " why should I be flea-bitten at 
Nazareth?" As if the Holy Land were Palestine 
more than England or Massachusetts ! The steps of 
Christ? They are no more on the slope of Olivet or 
along the shore of Galilee, road to Emmaus, or way 
to Capernaum, than in every place of need and path of 
progress, or enterprise of philanthropy. Asylums for 
the sick, and cargoes of flour for starving Frenchmen 
three thousand miles off*, are as good and sacred as the 
upper chamber of the Passover or the Cross carried 
to Calvary. A mission to India or the Sandwich 
Islands, a commission sailing to San Domingo, or 
sitting, lords from England and peers in America, at 
Washington, to settle international disputes, — are as 
divine as conclaves of apostles dividing out their 
routes over land or sea to Corinth and Athens, and 
Thessalonica and Rome. The reports of committees, 
examining matters essential to the public weal, ought 
to be as religious in motive as any old Epistle to the 
Philippians or the Hebrews. Why should the living 
Present slink away so ashamed before the ghost of the 
Past ? To-day is as good as ever dawned. EgiDtism — 



THEISM. 147 

abounding, all-devouring coveting of place and pri- 
ority, loving to lead — alone hinders the Divinity, as 
Victor Hugo said Napoleon vi^ith his ambition an- 
noyed God. We have no one king or queen, crowned 
like Victoria or William ; so everybody wants to be 
empress or emperor. In what shining talents and 
splendid virtues this self-love is the only flaw, fatal 
to the rounded integrity ! No egotist can be greatly 
loved. However modest, deferent, deprecatory you 
are, if a pushing forth-putting temper, a greed of 
precedence be the main-spring, people will know it ; 
and the nearer you come and friendlier you would 
seem, the more they keenly feel, and make you feel, 
their distrust. Be not the fly in your own ointment. 
Lo ! all the constellations of truth and beauty in God's 
heavens are waiting and wanting to come down to 
you, and you put yourself a mote in the object-glass 
of your own telescope, to shut out the spectacle and 
spoil the revelation ! Leave your self-pronunciation 
at last behind. Simon Magus thought the Holy Ghost 
could be bought for nioney : will you sell it for admi- 
ration? It will not be the Holy Ghost, but some 
plausible falsehood — mock pearl, paste-diamond, 
pinchbeck metal — your vanity barters for its food to 
grow fat on. You are high and lofty, O my man of 
talent and fame ! But any man, to move me, must not 
be so tall I cannot see God over him. 

The lower creatures have the same God as we. 
They, like the poor negroes once, have been neglected 
in the pulpit and the religious books. Of that beauti- 
ful Mosaic Law, " Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that 
treadeth out the corn," Paul asks, "Doth God take 



.148 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our 
sakes ? " With all due respect for the great apostle, I 
answer, Yes : God does care for oxen as well as for us. 
In this slighting comment on the poor patient drudges 
for man I have no share. Beast and bird how like us in 
nature as in structure ! I saw some pigeons lighting 
on a narrow window-ledge. There not being quite room 
for all, it interested me to see how dainty and restless, 
with what clean and delicate step they moved, like 
men or women on a crowded bench. At last one or 
two got up as you do in a car, only on wings instead 
of legs, then flew off to a wider seat ; where, the rest 
following, they formed in line again, and seemed to 
have an excellent social festive time together, as if 
they were giving a party or returning calls. I thought 
they behaved as sensibly as people do in a pew or at 
a picnic, and were as kind and polite as gentlemen 
and ladies. I saw a dog make signs with his right 
forepaw to his master across the street as if asking 
leave to come, and then spring over like lightning 
the moment he was allowed. Those our poor kins- 
folk have a measure of inspiration. He whom we 
worship is God not only of the Jew or Gentile, but 
of the hunted deer and over-driven horse. " Not a 
sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father " : 
is not that in all literature the tenderness most 
sublime ? 

" Tiger, tiger, burning bright 
In the forests of the night. 
Did He who made the lamb make thee?" 

Yes : the tiger has rights not to be tormented, which 
we are bound to respect. 



THEISM. 149 

Through all material changes God abides the same. 
The revelation of Him, before whose face the heaven 
and earth fled away, only anticipated science. Gross 
bulk, there is no more in the world : nothing is left but 
power. Matter is committing suicide in the material- 
ist's hands. We stand face to face with the Infinite 
Force. We sometimes see in man or woman a Beauty 
that takes away our breath. It is a ray of the Divine 
Spiritualism to announce the retinue of spirits, without 
which the universe would seem a tomb ; but all have 
one God. 

Can we speak to him ? Can we refrain, with this 
geyser in our heart bursting up to heaven.? But he 
sees our situation. Beggary will not turn one hair 
white or black. " Which way do you call the wind.? '* 
an Irishman was asked. " I could not call it any 
way," he replied. How about the wind that bloweth 
where it listeth ? Becalmed in Frenchman's Bay, our 
skipper whistled for the wind importunately and long, 
till it came in a gale from the hills. Who can read 
Cowper's 

" Celestial breeze, no longer stay, 
But fill my sails and speed my way," 

without a heart-echo.? Earnest seeking is prayer. 
Charles Goodyear spent his substance, threw in his 
health, used up his family, and tired patrons and 
friends searching for a form of India-rubber to be of 
service in the arts ; till, as Forceythe Willson said, 
"Nature, also worn out, told him, 'Take it, my 
child ! '■'' When my search for a lost keepsake became 
agony, I found it in dust or desert or sea. God is 
constrained by prayer, and cannot choose but heed our 



150 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

request ; for the genuine prayer in us is part of him- 
self and no whim of ours, as we are part of him. It 
belongs to the constitution of things, and is one of the 
laws that cannot break. God, said one, could have 
made a finer fruit than the strawberry. No : in the 
French phrase, he does his whole possible. Can he 
help seeing us? Hearing us, no more ! " Thou must 
hear me," Luther said. He bides tryst. You will 
not give your razor or the reins to a child. God will 
give us only good. When words fail us, the inward 
incense rises and rests ever in the soul, like smoke 
from the chimney, the cloud on Mont Blanc, or the 
powdery snow blown for ever round the head of the 
Ortler Spitze, the Alp-giant in the Tyrol. " I took 
him up into my room and prayed with him," said 
the minister, of the Liberal Tract distributer at the 
Tremont Temple ; " but I have concluded not to be 
bothered with him any more." But prayer, that is 
perfunctory or used as magic, is jugglery and pretence. 
It must be patient and painstaking, like that in the 
Garden, to be heard. 

We seek unity : but God is difference too. The Son 
is eternally generated, not as an individual, but an ele- 
ment in the entire substance and essence of things. 
Physical science as vainly as metaphysical strives to 
reduce this other yet not alien quality. The philo- 
sophic astronomer tells us of the fire-inist or nebula 
or world-stuff, of which the worlds were made. We 
might, so far as concerns solving the problem of crea- 
tion, as well stop with the shining, rolling worlds 
themselves. Whence the vapor they are made of, is 
as hard to say as whence the masses and orbits com- 



THEISM. 151 

plete. The point we make is a paradox, alters not our 
position, and brings us no nearer the Source. Can we 
get the universe out of a primordial germ? From 
some vesicle was the balloon of Nature inflated, and 
the whole bubble blown? By what breath without 
mouth or lungs ! The bellows must be accounted for, 
and One they were handled by. A marvellous child 
thrust his pipe into that soap from which star and 
planet were thrown off'! Such a view of the origin is 
a conception, but no thought. It is unthinkable. So is 
all derivation of Nature from design. We can speak 
of the design of an artist or artisan. There are 
models and patterns, after which weavers and carpen- 
ters arrange their thread and timber. But we cannot 
distinguish between the Originator and his work. Cre- 
ator and creation who can separate with his eye or in 
his mind? I conceive of the fender, which I look at 
while I write, as constructed of iron, smelted from 
ore, blasted or quarried from the mine by a series of 
inventions. But whither did God go for his materials, 
and in what manner were they fetched ? Did they lie 
at first within or outside the Being they were used by? 
For God there is no quarry to discover, and no date 
to lay his corner-stone. It is not supposable that he 
began at any point in time or space, or that there was 
any beginning, such as the Book of Genesis declares. 
It commences now^ says the photographer to his sitter. 
But He never commenced. The universe was never 
less, nor will be greater, any more than himself. We 
may say, fitness; but any attempt to consider periods 
or compartments, as including all, is nonsense and 
folly. God has no era, and the epochs we name are 



152 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

for accommodation and convenience, not perfect science 
or history of his deeds. The Pyramids, Strasbourg, 
Vatican, had their architects. Ceiling of the Sistine 
Chapel was plaster once. But none has ever breathed 
lo say where or how the Eternal Builder put his hand 
to the foundation of his palace ; and Jesus is as igno- 
rant of the day or hour as the babe in your crib. Mr. 
Huxley gives us a good phrase in the "Physical Basis 
of Life ; " yet his protoplasm is itself no simple thing, 
but combination or composition of several elements, 
whose putting together is a mystery so beyond our 
search, that the adjective proto^ or first, seems a sheer 
assumption and misnomer. The First hides under and 
behind every atom he employs. Besides, Mr. Stirling 
shows how proofless is the dogma that any one proto- 
plasm serves for vegetable, animal, and man. Every 
species, through the whole range of organization, may 
have its own. Its homogeneity takes for granted the 
point to be demonstrated, and is recommended to the 
mind by the fascination and flattery there always is in 
any single explanation of all phenomena. 

There is in matter no elucidation of the genesis of 
Nature. Spirit is the first term. Thought is the start- 
ing-place, not the result. Infinite Self, to which time 
or place is not, save as opportunity of motion and 
transition, is the centre, which is circumference too. 
All we know is a Becoming, which is in and from 
Being. Blessed that the secret is not found out by us ; 
for then the object and continuance of life were gone. 
It was said of one, She ceases to care for a man as soon 
as she knows him. Be not regretful you have not 
ascertained the Divine method : no interest in existence 
for an intellectual creature would remain. 



VI. 

NATURALISM. 

THEOLOGY has been a standing insult to Nature. 
But by what rights of primogeniture ? It is no 
elder brother or better born. Nature is that word of 
God which theology means. The assault is suicide. 
It is a false contrast to oppose Nature to Revelation, 
every syllable of which comes through her mouth. 
Nature is not contrary to Spirit which it voices, nor to 
art which voices //, but only to artifice. The true 
distinction is that all religion which is not natural is 
artificial. Nature, or our knowledge of Nature, ad- 
vances, while theology is stationary, — professes to 
have learned out. It sits by the roadside with impro- 
gressive complacency, as a lout reviles the sister that 
passes by. No wonder the theologian insists that 
Nature cannot tell us of God ; for she never originated, 
and cannot indorse his schemes. Living close to Na- 
ture is good for health and worldly wisdom : why not 
for character and truth, and to import common sense 
into our creed } Here is Nature's revenge : that every 
system, so far as it leaves her, becomes artificial. Is 
this quality better in doctrine or ritual than in man- 
ners or speech ? Much of the present belief and wor- 



154 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

ship of the Church lacks genuineness. It has no 
charm for a sincere mind, or challenge for the attention 
of a strong one. Those who wait on the ministrations 
complain, as some have done at watering-places, that 
the table is poor, the food scant, and they have to 
carry their own provisions, though but a cracker, to 
partake of in secret. Said my friend, who was over- 
persuaded to go to a showy church, " I had to spend 
my time looking round at the building and the bon- 
nets ; for I took in the sermon with the millionth part 
of my mind." Many Churchmen and Church-women 
so belong to the great class of artificial people, it is 
not strange those who can abide nothing but reality 
choose to be unchurched, and that thoughtful persons 
fall away from ordinances and tests. Artificial folk 
we know too well in society to wish to meet them in 
the temple. Their love is painted fire ; their protec- 
tion, a Quaker gun ; their loyalty is for the spoils of 
office ; their philanthropy rises when the tide turns 
against slavery and oppression ; and they will be for 
woman's rights when the majority of men are. We 
have all been cursed with artificial friends, following 
and smiling in our prosperity, as when you go forth 
on a bright day every lazy creature creeps out to bask 
in the sun. But the overcast sky of our fortunes 
shows their affections to be affectations. In our ex- 
tremity they desert us. When we are sick and weak, 
and they have no hope we can do any more for them, 
they drop off*. They will not need us, and think we 
shall not complain or call them to account when we 
are gone ; for " dead men tell no tales." Their ties 
with us are for ornament alone, like those knots and 



NATURALISM. 



155 



bands, cunningly carved in architecture, giving but the 
appearance of strength, only v^eakening the pillars by 
every grain in their construction cut avv^ay. Nature, 
from the lips of piety a term of reproach, and mark 
of man's depravity and corruption of the world ? We 
speak of the Divine nature. But when we change the 
adjective to human, it spoils the noun, and Milton's 
" human face divine " is a contradiction in terms ! Not 
so. Nature is substance, and every thing substantial 
is good. 

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul." 

But do the scholars who think Nature herself fallen 
consider what blasphemy to His body is their diagno- 
sis? Nature is the proceeding of spirit, language of 
revelation, material and finish of art ; for, says Shak- 
speare, — 

*' Nature is made better by no mean, 
But Nature makes that mean : so, o'er that art, 
Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an art 
That Nature makes." 

There is no distinction of natural and revealed relig- 
ion. Either is the other, if one or both be true. It 
matters not whether our knowledge be growth into 
God or his descent into us. 

But for what ideas are we to Nature in debt.'' First, 
that of Infinity. Does it come from Scripture } But 
whence the Scripture.? From creation the prophet's 
mind had it, ere it could flow from the prophet's pen. 
All ideas are within, phenomena are but the occasions. 
Imagination is the artist sitting in his secret studio to 



156 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

mould and tint the stuff of Nature's quarry. Without 
the starry vault, whence the notion of immensity.? 
This sparkling hollow what shape shall match ? Tak- 
ing a hint from geometrical figures, my friend called 
it diagrams of light. It seems an endless beach for 
the eye to wander over. It is an hour-glass through 
which stars fall like sand. It is a celestial railway to 
whose last station we never get. '' Milky Way " we 
call part of it ; and the new-arrived German pointed 
and asked if it were Milk Street. It is headland after 
headland from which we leap into the bottomless deep. 
It is a transparent lake we sail over, a trembling line 
we hang on, our downward gaze returning the image 
of the upward. Nature pale before revelation ? God 
lighted her great altar-candle as well as the lamp of 
reason, or taper in any prophet's bosom, and the too 
often dark lantern of the Church. 

Is Eternity an abstract conception ? The world is a 
notched stick, a register of vast lapses. Said the 
Greek, It never grows old. But, fresh as it contrives 
to look, it bears marks of incomputable age. It is a 
genealogy and record of time, — man's family-tree. 
Had it been fashioned to cover its tracks and efface 
its own history ; if the earth obliterated all transac- 
tions on its surface or in its depths ; if it came before 
us spick and span, with the furniture varnish upon it 
just from the shop, like something turned from a 
lathe, created new every moment as sentimental phil- 
osophers say, — what could it give us of that feeling 
of duration which is our stepping-stone into eternity? 
But as I walk along the shore and note the crumbling 
cliffs, the fragments fallen in countless heaps, the cob- 



NATURALISM. 



157 



ble-stones they have been worn into, the comminuted 
pebbles, and the fine brown or white sand into which 
the granite mountains have at last been ground by the 
waves ; as I notice huge upland boulders delicately 
poised as if their melting vessels of ice had let them 
softly to the ground, and others with bits of stone 
underneath acting as chisels with which they have 
ploughed their way, showing in the smooth grooves 
the unmistakable direction of the geologic scratch ; 
and as I observe how Nature, ready to heal her own 
wounds, has clothed with beautiful lichens, in colors 
faster than of any art, their enormous sides, — I ask 
how long it took to do all this ; and, from the futility 
of attempting any chronology, take refuge in the ever- 
lasting. I looked at a cedar rooted on the edge of the 
precipice, — an old Atlantic sentinel, standing guard 
of vegetable life over against the barren waste before 
Columbus heaved in sight of the Western shore, — with 
the knotted stump of a more ancient tree enclosed. We 
do not remember, said my friend, when we did this : it 
has dropped out of our recollection. We have turned 
over some of the pages of this " infinite book of se- 
crecy," and detect everywhere vestiges of' former life. 
We dig up fossil remains of animal and plant. We 
find, in petrifactions, other cemeteries and mausole- 
ums than man has reared. We discover in caves 
rude tools of primitive fashion. We explore in the 
rock, once mud, the prints of the feet of pre-Adamite 
birds. We calculate the periods requisite to build the 
coral reefs and lagoons of the Pacific Sea. Mr. Dar- 
win, trying to explain the origin of all existence from 
primeval germs, has to confess missing links ; and 



158 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

knows not how long they were in Nature's chain, or 
what gulfs they spanned in the bridge of the never- 
ending march. Of our idea of eternity Nature is the 
suggestion, if the Eternal One be the cause. 

Has not the idea of Omnipotence like derivation, — 
the will, we are conscious of, confirmed in things ? All 
this motion hints the self- moved, the Infinite Determina- 
tion. How admirably dextrous he who keeps half a 
dozen balls in the air ! But what the vigor and supple- 
ness by which these larger countless ones are kept from 
falling or interfering? To the invisible wind, sweep- 
ing and striking, rousing the ocean to send far inland 
the sound of fury with which it founders ships at sea 
or dashes them ashore, making the midnight sky the 
alarm-bell struck by its hammer, — whence or whither 
in its flight we cannot tell, or how twisted into the 
tornado over the plains and among the gorges of the 
hills ; simoom of the desert, hurricane round promon- 
tories and among the islands, or cyclone and typhoon 
of the Indian seas, — we owe the conception of strength. 
That we may not miss this realizing sense, the earth- 
quake does not confine itself to the tropics, but travels 
north to shake every city and village by turns. Vol- 
canoes open to show the pent-up vapor in this boiler 
of the planet is not exhausted ; and make us shudder 
at the force, in rivets of iron and rock, beneath the 
mighty deck we tread. On every side are signs of 
unexpended power whose leash is in the Almighty 
hand. We ponder over the long dykes of trap-rock 
that lace the granite coast, and ask what heat and 
fierceness thrust them up from their fusion far below. 
In one spot on the American continent the terrible 



NATURALISM. ' 1 59 

pot has overflowed and spread in a chaotic mass all 
about ; and in some places the granite, through which 
the molten streams were forced, has itself melted again, 
and risen to break in two the trap by which itself was 
broken at first. As a ship signals to us her condition, 
so does this aerial vessel of the globe inform us of her 
story and state. Does she not hold out colors, the flag 
of power, to which the banners of nations are vanity ? 
I know not what innate sense I may have had of a re- 
sistless will ; only that the resounding breeze which 
woke me on my bed in the dark woke also my child- 
ish soul. Gentler tokens of equal energy more affect 
me now, in the tide coming and going every day. I 
sit and write on the sea's edge. As I look up, the 
waters have ebbed, the sea has lost its arm. In the 
empty bay the long sea-weed, that had stood upright 
with perpetual courtesy in the waves, lies prostrate for 
leagues, and paints with pale green the wide reaches 
that take their names from long since deceased tenants 
that saw the picture as I see it now. No loom ever 
wove carpet like the stripes and patches of brown, 
yellow, and black that variegate this marine verdure, 
through which the sluggish channel, shrunk to a thread, 
winds its way, turning the neighboring islet into main- 
land accessible to foot of man or beast. I bend to my 
task in that musing work, which makes hours pass as 
instants ; then lift the eye, and lo ! the inlet is full 
again, so that fleets of kingdoms might ride on it. 
Without raising its voice to the murmur of one louder 
ripple, the sea has rolled in. What mathematics shall 
reckon the liquid tons heaped against the hemisphere 
while I have not heard the ticking of the clock? It 



l6o RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

seems no unworthy task for the sun and moon to carry 
this water-pot of the planet on their shoulders, to fill 
the pail now for the East, now for the West ; and of 
this refrigerator and salt sanitarium make the most for 
mankind. 

But it takes not things of tremendous weight and 
size to stir this sense. A little bird, lighting on the 
tree-top and filling the whole air for miles with the 
song from its slender throat, while the sun climbs to 
the zenith, excites the feeling of ability and vitality 
which there is no way to estimate or play out, more 
than of the turning on their axes of planets and suns. 

What did those who have pronounced upon Nature's 
defects know of her resources.? They were like an 
infant-school pretending to all the knowledge pos- 
sessed by their mistress. How invention has gone for- 
ward, and our conception of Nature with greater stride, 
wiping out inadequate notions on which the old creeds 
were based, since this conventional disparagement 
began, and compelling perpetual revision of theology ; 
though Conservatism resists, like the mop of Sydney 
vSmith's famous Dame against the tide ! 

But one want in Nature, it is said, we must confess : 
there is no sign of forgiveness or mercy. We depend 
on the miraculous communication for that. Can there, 
then, be aught in God not signified in his works? If 
Nature remits no penalty of broken law, is there proof 
that God does ; or is any voiding or suspension of law 
an equal fiction, in the world or the soul ? Goodness 
is manifest : the universe overflows with it. What at 
first we count hostile turns out to be friendly ; and this 
love or goodness is the only attribute, including all we 



NATURALISM. l6l 

call tenderness or pity, such as seems to quiver on the 
lips of the Phidian Jove. The mercy is not in letting 
us off from the proper punishment in full measure for 
our fault, but in so constituting us, and ordaining the 
issues of our acts, that no sin can be fatal ; a fatality 
of eternal woe for temporary transgression being the 
monstrous wrong and cruelty for so many ages palmed 
off on human superstition for the justice of God. Have 
children a right to parental sympathy? To Divine 
compassion we have the same claim. It is no gratuity 
he could fairly withhold, at his arbitrary choice. It is 
not his option, but necessity. It appears in all his 
providence as much as in any special grace. It is 
what physicians call Nature's healing power. The 
instinctive effort to expel any bane from the system in 
the shape of disease, — a cough, sweat, fever, eruption, 
which is the evil demon going out of doors ; the mar- 
vellous recoveries from nervous functional organic 
prostration, Nature being, what man is erroneously 
called, the resurrection doctor ; the formation of a new 
tooth, bone, nail, or claw, when the old has decayed 
or been torn away ; the abundant juices that run in the 
same season to a second crop of grass, berries, blos- 
soms, or fruit ; the throes of remorse to drive out 
iniquity before the setting in of mortification or dry 
rot, — all show salvation in the make of things as 
much as in any supernatural display. 

Character must absorb and be nature before it is 
worth. Good-natured is our term to describe perfect 
temper. Dr. Spurzheim's observation forced him to 
say he preferred a wife good by nature to one good by 
grace. Benevolence, to be relied on, must go deeper 

11 



1 62 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

than will,, into instinct and blood;. Then there is no 
need of what revivalists call change of heart. I have 
heard Orthodox people depreciate the amiable quali- 
ties I regretted they did not possess. Change your 
heart, O friend ? So much the worse for me were it 
changed ! " Keep that position," says the artist to his 
sitter. Keep that disposition, I am moved to say to 
some I love : it could not be any better. " She has not 
experienced a change," mournfully one said of a dying 
negro woman who was a Liberal Christian. " We 
hope not : none was required or would be a benefit," 
was the reply. I have seen in a young child, just cut- 
ting her teeth, an expression of patience, which was 
the identical trait we read of in the Book of Martyrs, 
with beauty not surpassed by Daniel in the lions' den, 
the three in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, Paul in the 
stocks, Peter in the dungeon, or Jesus on the cross. I 
should not have admired John Brown on his gallows 
any more. 

But did not the Christian dispensation bring in merit 
of a quite new style ? It were sad had virtue denied 
itself, or ever been born. " Cradle of Liberty," said 
Kossuth, — "I do not like the phrase : it has a savor 
of mortality." The heraldry of holiness is too old to 
trace : it has not altered its coat-of-arms. Have we 
nobler than Plutarch's heroes ? Were our soldiers at 
Bull's Run better than those at Thermopylae ? What 
modern captain braver than Codes kept the bridge.'* 
Where a case of more unselfish sacrifice than Curtius 
leaping into the gulf? Is maid or matron now more 
jealous than Lucretia of honorable fame? Purity, 
loyalty, patriotism, and generosity are everlasting ex- 



NATURALISM. 1 63 

cellencies, the monopoly of no religion or age. The 
oak did not become emblem of courage battling with 
harder storms than the north-east can unloose, nor 
the sweet-brier with its roses and thorns a symbol of 
intangible chastity, in our era. There were brave men 
before Agamemnon, and virgins before the mother of 
Christ. To what time or denomination does a good 
man belong ? He is Quaker of the inner light, and 
Catholic in the outer worship ; he sees Unity of person 
branching wider than any Trinity ; he is at home with 
Methodist fervor and Episcopal decorum; he likes 
Congregational freedom and Presbyterian order; he 
believes in Orthodox discipline and Universal redemp- 
tion ; he agrees with the Spiritualist's presence of un- 
seen friend, and in a rising from the grave of body 
and dust into a glorified form. All parties covet him 
because he adheres to none, and is above any, having 
the freedom of the city of God. No society or cere- 
monial suffices to hold or bind moral ^integrity. No 
meeting-house is big enough for the soul. No more 
empty the pretence of the babe's nurse to appropriate 
the grown man, Washington or Lincoln, than that of 
the Church to keep her charge in leading-strings, when 
it has outgrown the nursery-room of ecclesiastic rule. 
I remember, when a boy, how I envied the horses out- 
side the sanctuary on Sunday. Though they, too, were 
tied, it was with a longer tether ; and my pasture was 
dry compared to their green round of grass. 

He makes better men than churchmen, was the com- 
plaint against a popular preacher: was it not pan- 
egyric? Said a Radical to a young girl in a Catholic 
school, "You cannot be religious too soon: you need 



164 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

defence from whatever quarter against earthly vanities 
and lures. I beg you, be no sectarian : I do not want 
you for a proselyte ; I would rather a thousand times 
you should be defended than agree with me in opinion." 
All who are religious are at one, and need only the 
atonement they have received. By a humanity deeper 
than strife, Rebel and Federal soldiers exchanged com- 
forts, in the intervals of an engagement, across the for- 
tification lines ; so we stretch hands over rival frowning 
battlements, and recognize each other by a surer than 
Masonic touch. The wisdom of Natural Religion is 
justified of her children. Wordsworth doubtless was 
a good member of the English Church, but spoke 
from his heart when he wrote, — 

"And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety." 

When Saffbrd was astonishing a circle by his swift 
computations, and one asked by what training he 
solved the fearful sums, " By nature," answered the 
chief of American mathematicians standing by. We 
notice this divine property of reverence even in the 
beasts who look up to man as their deity. Well, if 
the bowed head or lifted kerchief, or hat held before 
the face in great cathedrals, express always a deference 
as sincere. Even the worm trying to raise its horned 
proboscis makes some figure of aspiration. The alarm 
with which our cruelty has managed to inspire almost 
all the lower creatures is inverted veneration. The 
highest reach of spiritual culture is nature ; for it 
is absurd to call natural that savage state from which 
man is moved naturally and irresistibly to depart. 



NATURALISM. 1 65 

The consistent theologians took bravely the conse- 
quence of their accusation of our nature, that outward 
Nature is evil too. We ridicule the mystic fancy that 
man is responsible for the obliquity of the ecliptic and 
might say, I snow and rain ; but it is matched in the 
older doctrine that the world was ruined in his fall ; 
that the pits and brambles, barren swamps, hot deserts, 
and icy poles and ragged cliffs, came of his sin. Milton 
sings of the tears Nature wept over the eating of the 
forbidden fruit ; and we have all seen and felt on our 
cheeks, as if on hers, those plashing drops, blotches 
of wet falling wide and slow, from which he doubtless 
took his line, though probably nothing dreadful and 
deplorable had occurred. It is our mood that Nature 
is cipher of. " The heavens mourn," said a Democrat, 
on a rainy day, " over the disastrous vote." *' These 
are tears of laughter," a Whig replied. The rifts in 
the globe are too grand and beautiful, too redundant 
in health and fertility, to have a curse for their cause. 
Who would have the world round as a bullet, smooth 
as a ball of yarn, bright as a bead in the sun ? These 
drifts of sleet and mist shall be not puddles of mud 
only, but sweet springs and lilies and strawberries by 

and by. 

"The dews shall weep thy fall to-night," 

says Herbert to the Day : but how many morning- 
glories from such dews arise? Byron's like figure of 
Ardennes 

" Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves, 
Over the unreturning brave," 

might be of gladness just as well. The gorges are 
better than a polished surface ; the billows, than an 



1 66 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

unruffled sea ; thorns and thistles, than the spontaneous 
production, in which man himself would vegetate and 
rot, and his soul never rouse from sleep. The flower 
we could snatch with hasty impunity were not so 
lovely as that whose virgin sweetness we win from 
its sharp defence with a bleeding hand. Only from 
" the nettle, danger," can safety be plucked. 

Abolish the so-called evil, and you abolish the good. 
How many virtues — of patience, forgiveness, commis- 
eration, magnanimity — are conditioned on human 
defects ! God understands himself and his children 
in them also. Beware how you make Nature evil. 
Driven out with the theological fork, she returns and 
prevails. Truth to my nature, good or bad, is my 
only task. Is it a w^asp's duty to bring honey? Is the 
copperhead or hooded snake accountable for its venom 
or fangs? If the Scribes and Pharisees were the 
devil's children, their only obligation was to make 
good his designs. 

But do we not see native depravity in the child, — 
irritable, wilful, wanting what it cannot have ? What 
achievements are wrapped up in that will, affections 
in that sensibility, arts and sciences, endless inventions 
and improvements, in those wants which grasp at every 
shining object, and are discontented that the moon will 
not come down ! You are angry with your child be- 
cause it will not be polite as you dictate. But the 
fault is yours, not its. Will you beat it with brute 
strength ? Would you mould it in your fingers as wax 
or dough? Do you not own that new individuality 
Divine Personality shapes because it needs another 
instrument, and desires no repetition of you, whom 



NATURALISM. 1 67 

one said, It is enough to have once ? God will lay you 
down, and have done with you, if you push and en- 
croach. Force not the little master or mistress to come 
and kiss the gentleman, as if the salute or caress, when, 
not voluntary, had value for your courtesy as merchan- 
dise in trade. Let the gentleman take that castle him- 
self, if he can, in fair truck and barter. If I cannot win 
your babe to my arms, I will respect its freedom, as I 
would the affections of your grown-up daughter or son. 
The doctrine of Natural Religion is not unchristian. 
Jesus was the pre-eminent specimen. From the un- 
folding of his own soul came all his wondrous works 
and words. Had he been anywhere to see God out 
of his bosom ? When he said. Before Abraham was^ 
I am^ he meant no pre-existence you do not share, 
only you are not inwardly developed to perceive it 
so clear. All persons are convertible into equivalent 
glory, if not into whatever he was. When Lucy Stone, 
in the riot, told her friends to look out for themselves, 
and was asked, "Who will protect you?" — "This 
gentleman," she answered, turning to the leader of the 
mob, who instantly proved as good as her word. It is 
the touch of sunshine that makes the roughest bud 
open. Paul was hid in Saul all the time. Fickle 
Peter was not misnamed a rock : the superficial wave 
has but to retire to disclose the granite ledge ; and 
under unstable feeling lies unshakable resolve. To 
the nature within nature we appeal. In a graceful 
dancer I admired the flying feet that struck so surely 
every note of the tune which flew from pipe and viol 
through the air, with pre-established harmony in na- 
ture between the melodious chords and those of the 



1 68 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

human frame. Like answer in our spiritual constitu- 
tion just education will find to every law of purity and 
line of truth ; and we shall know that each genuine 
sentiment and resentment of the mind has its part in 
the music, and is a string in that harp, made of living 
fibre, which the angels play. 

Nature, to our meditation, supplies the moral that 
goes with the fact. With this power we must be on 
good terms. Nature pardons no mistakes. She will 
not give me an inch of rope or hair-breadth of billow 
to save me from drowning or oversetting in my boat. 
But on her fidelity we can depend. Point for point, to 
the end of the line, it will answer to ours. Her pen- 
alty is the other side of her reward. The mechanic 
puts his board to the circular saw. If he puts his arm, 
it will cut that just as well. If his hand is caught in 
the wheel, it will be carried round as swiftly as the 
strap. The car will crush my toe on the rail, with the 
same coolness and iron equanimity as it does the boy's 
copper cent. The Almighty's buckler is for his chil- 
dren's defence ; but they must not rush on its thick 
bosses themselves. Had there never been a line of 
Holy Writ, Nature would have hinted obedience of her 
laws, with every child's finger that went into the flame, 
or moth that hovered about a lamp, or flood that came 
and wind that blew and beat upon the house ; with 
every spring freshet or lava-stream that tore up the 
fields and burnt or bore the villages off*, a teacher of 
Theology. 



VII. 

MATERIALISM. 

\^7'HAT is the starting-point? " In the beginning 
▼ ▼ God created the heavens and the earth." But 
the materialist says, In the beginning the heavens and 
the earth created God, or the idea of God in the human 
mind ; having first created the mind capable of that 
idea, fancy, or fact. But derivation from dust is a 
theory that disposes of no metaphysical difficulty. In 
an ever-changing universe, something must self-exist. 
Is or has matter any self? In the play of Ruy Bias, 
the hero bursts, in a closing scene, into the v^arning 
cry, " I am here ! " Out of no act of this mighty play 
of the world can the / be kept. To no after-piece can 
it be postponed : it is an impossible feat for any Ro- 
man Lucretius or French Encyclopaedist. An Infi- 
nite Self, root of every other, appears with the first 
motion of curiosity, runs like the ghost under the 
platform, reappears at every point, — a giant that car- 
ries us all the time, a spy we never escape, a sapper 
and miner of whatever godless hypothesis we build. 
Does the traveller go on foot, this has outstripped him 
by rail ; does he run post-haste, this, like the telegraph 
after the thief, has sped with the lightning ; does he 
drive his stakes in the wilderness, he wakes up mor- 



I^O RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

tified with this pioneer ahead. The Romans were 
right to make Terminus itself a god, and our poet is 
right with his " god of bounds." It is a contradiction 
to talk of any bound of God. 

In this almanac of Nature, what is the date ? We 
cannot, without a sense of absurdity, date mind from 
matter. An inmost sentiment, deeper than sense, 
stronger than logic, wider than what we observe, and 
higher than all we understand, forces us to date matter 
from mind. The masters of wisdom, Plato and Aris- 
totle and Spinoza, join in this verdict with the chiefs 
of inspiration, Moses and Job, Jesus and Paul. Your 
primordial atom assumes order and an Ordainer ; 
your protoplasm implies a Protoplast and plastic art, 
an Architect of the many-chambered house, a First in- 
cluding the many, and a Self-motion without which is 
no motion ; your substance, One that stands under and 
holds up ; your conscience, a Detective pursuing us 
from the trees of the garden through every web of 
sophistry or thicket of shame. 

Matter is multitude, which it is preposterous to put 
for the original "term and make the parent of unity, 
instead of the result. What is the depositor but the 
soul, from which all this fund or bank of particles pro- 
ceeds, and by which it is held, something it dropped 
by the way and shall resume at will, like cast-off 
clothes or an old manuscript, to go through the mill 
again? Matter is the mind's decayed self, buried for 
a while, and awaiting a resurrection. All this scene 
of visible glory is but a receiving-tomb. Lower life 
is the sepulchre of worn-out higher, with angels at the 
door to blow the wakening trump, at which the rock 



MATERIALISM. 



171 



itself shall rise to consciousness, the clod clap on 
wings, and lost spirits learn hell is but a way back to 
heaven. 

You are sure of matter? But who are you, and 
what is it to be sure ; or what is matter sure of? The 
physicist despises superstition and idolatry, but talks 
of our origin in the elements. What idolatry so deep, 
superstition so stubborn, polytheism so manifold, or 
pantheon so wide! Deification of the elements as 
factors of whatever is called God or man ? Give us 
back Jove and Juno, Mars and Minerva, Vulcan 
and Venus, for better deities. Let us study religion 
with Homer for our text-book, as nearer the truth 
than the senseless atoms. If the elements are more 
than instruments, let the carpenter be made by his 
tools, the painter by his paint, the chemist by the gases 
he combines in his retorts. If we shrink, with the old 
sufferer, from saying to corruption, "Thou art my 
father," and to the worm, " Thou art my mother and 
my sister," it is a noble hesitance. We subordinate 
our Author to ashes in subordinating ourselves. To 
make the first term countless is like making the vari- 
ations precede the tune, and the accompaniment prior 
to the player. A lifeless womb of life is unthinkable. 
The gem is not made by the rock that imbeds it, nor 
the flower by the soil it grows in ; and the phrase 
spo7ttaneous generation is a figure drawn from choice. 
There was a mother of the matrix we were shaped in, 
and hewer of the rock from which we were hewn. 
The wonderful Person contains road and sky, is at the 
goal and the outset, stands for the post and slips in 
behind the limit, and constrains us to conclude as we 



172 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

commence. Matter may be our nursery ; but who is 
our nurse ? Matter is but the door of invisible force, 
lying always in fineness, not in gross bulk. Are the 
subtilties made of the masses which they toss? Are 
light, heat, electricity, magnetism, product of some 
creative crucible? The composition is the clod. A 
French chemist reduces all not to atoms, but to atom- 
icities, or active powers, — shall we say, to One Atomi- 
city, whose name we dare not speak ? The materialist 
starts from the particles, and gets into the presence- 
chamber of the King. Encourage him on his way. 
Give materialism rope enough, perfect liberty, and it 
will hang itself. It thinks to commit murder, and 
commits suicide. 

Yet physical philosophy is not without benefit. It 
has made the wordy Sahara of metaphysics green and 
fruitful. Into the void of abstractions it puts form and 
color, a language clear and picturesque. Let us give 
thanks for its portfolio of sketches of the actual world. 
This earth is so fair, I reserve my opinion if heaven 
be better. I take not the preacher's assertion. Let 
me pause before this picture. Hurry me not with 
premature descriptions of the next. There are mo- 
ments of visible revelation, when life is unmixed bless- 
ing, the cup is full, time disappears in eternity, there 
is no such thing as calamity, the soul is content and 
asks no more of God. A gleam of glory from the 
unveiled constitution of things sets the gate of paradise 
at our steps. We see death as the last scud of vapor 
that flits away. God makes his garment of matter so 
fine we little children can only clutch and gaze. 

Materialism humbles, too, our pretensions of a sepa- 



MATERIALISM. 1^3 

rate nature. A Hebrew scorn of animals, founded on a 
notion of their inferior origin, and existence for man's 
use, infected the Christian teachers, though not Jesus 
himself. To the naturalist, more than to the theolo- 
gian, we owe the growing interest in their welfare. 
It is the crown of civilization to apply the word hu- 
manity to a kindly treatment of every lower tribe. 
What but the science we condemn has taught us that 
this is no figure of speech or act of grace, but simple 
justice to creatures of the same dust as ourselves? 
Zeal to gather specimens may sometimes be cruel, 
and the eager pathologist pursue sharply the homol- 
ogies of structure and function. But a new sentiment 
is making the knife relent : the pinning and vivisec- 
tion once so remorseless now submit to the law of 
economy of pain. In regard to human beings too, 
materialism proclaims equality. It is no autocrat or 
aristocrat, but democrat. It shows one womb and 
cradle for all men. A narrow spiritualism, regarding 
the soul as not a flower or outgrowth, but aeolian 
attachment of the body, allowed cruel diversities 
among men. The Church suffers from its fancy of 
gifts in one, impossible to another, carried in the case 
of Jesus to the extent of miraculous generation and 
introduction to the world. But for him God would 
not love or save the rest of the house. The other 
members of the family have sinned past cure. The 
case is gone by default : the sword is unsheathed, and 
the throne burns with devouring wrath. But if this 
dear Son will bow to the stroke, and sprinkle his blood 
in the flame of that almighty forge, restoration to favor 
may be had ! Such gratuity at another's instance and 



1^4 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

intercession, I decline. If God will not love me for 
my own sake, I will not be loved. If he hates my 
nature, let him hate. If, says Mr. Mill, I must go to 
hell on any ground that goodness in God or man is not 
the same, to hell I will go ! Would you have your father 
or mother embrace you for your brother's or sister's 
sake ? Could you accept the affection tendered you on 
account of an older child or first-born ? This primo- 
geniture is no better in one place than another. An 
iniquity on earth, it is no magnanimity in heaven. 
We want a generous Father, or let us have none. 
Christ died for me ? I would die for him. He were 
worth dying for. If he died for us, it was because 
God saw that we were not worthless, but worthy. 
We want no sacrifice but of our own kind. If it was 
not my blood that flowed on the cross, it has no virtue 
for my sin. It was a drop of the circulation of the 
race, and therein its power to redeem. 

With the eternal All-mover, atom or immensity is 
the same. He is weigher and ganger of his own sub- 
stance and dimensions. The number of his meters is 
the note of his infinity. The hand raised in prayer or 
stretched for help is more continent of him than the 
heavens. Omnipresence which the materialist admits 
is only mechanical extent. But piety makes the lowly 
heart larger than the sky. " God is everywhere," said 
the Sunday-school teacher. "Is he in this room?" 
asked the little boy. "Yes." — "In my desk?" — 
" Certainly." — " In my hat.? " — " No doubt." — " In 
my pocket.?" — "Of course." — "No, he isn't: I 
haven't got any ! " God's presence is co-equal with the 
sense of it. The materialist's experiment of the end- 



MATERIALISM. 



175 



less subdivision of matter — observes our metaphysician, 
Mr. Harris — resembles travelling in a circle with the 
hope of some time coming to an end. Is not material 
multiplication, to reach the immeasurable, nonsense as 
sheer? Materialism is a counterfeit depth, and atones 
for being shallow^ only by being obscure. Its pro- 
fessors complain of metaphysical abstractions. They 
substitute physical ones. The definitions of Spencer 
are more prolix and less satisfying than the categories 
of Kant. Nothing but confusion can come from mak- 
ing things procreators of thought. Without parentage 
and rule of mental conception, they are starving or- 
phans, masterless steeds. In materialism is no rest, 
but endless chase, that brings no game to cover. It is 
the wild huntsman blowing a ghostly horn in a barren 
pursuit. But spirituality is peace. It finds the weight 
and specific gravity more truly than did the old philos- 
opher in his bath. 

It makes a difference to have the centre of gravity 
fall within or without. They who seek external foot- 
hold for the soul remind us of the toy whose perpetual 
attempt to recover its erectness is the amusement of the 
child. " Discontent is immortality." But it is not a 
famishing discontent. " Prone to action and to rest," 
says Pascal, " through action we seek rest." Blessed 
constitution, without which the apple would not have 
been eaten, or the fenced garden forsaken for the world, 
made so wide, as Goethe says, on purpose for our wan- 
dering ! Man would have been satisfied to vegetate 
and rot where he was born. The poise of the other 
hemisphere was wanted by the Genoese sailor as well 
as by the globe. By every discoverer, North or South, 



1^6 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

the same momentum has been felt. Finding the fate 
of Sir John Franklin, the explorer traverses himself. 
Captain Hall, in The Pola^'is^ searches for the counter- 
part of a map on some inward membrane. The stu- 
dent of geography or of the animated kingdoms lays 
out the metes and bounds of his own nature. Self- 
knowledge is the aim of his knowledge of animals and 
plants. The physicist goes round about the problem 
which the metaphysician directly grasps. Naturalist 
and supernaturalist would tell the bounds of God's 
acre with diverse method, each with his own rod and 
chain. The only question is if there be any Owner of 
the field, or the world is a wild lot with no claim. 
Marvellous canvas which no pencil ever touched, and 
a stranger set of cartoons than in any Vatican, with new 
sketches in numberless slides ! Whoever finds the 
problem easier so may be congratulated, as a child put 
off with empty promise. In Scott's novel, the lad 
begged the lady to give him silver, the only money he 
was acquainted with, and declined her gold. 

A thoughtless observation stops with the exterior. 
No personality is no origin and no destiny. Who is 
there to be immortal.? Whom go to? Why so fool- 
ish to try to put our foot beyond the border, break the 
hedge, or hang over the precipice where is no support 
but empty space, or climb above the top of our tree of 
life, unless there be indeed a path the vulture's eye 
hath not seen ? On this point Idealism and Material- 
ism once shook hands. It was a singular meeting of 
extremes, stranger than when Herod and Pilate became 
friends. But the permanent pos'ition of the material 
school was with Idealism a temporary phase. To 



MATERIALISM. I^^ 

reduce all to unsympathetic power, tossing out this 
ephemeron of man, to keep up an hour like the stray 
butterfly that wearily drops drowning in the tide, is 
mean and disrespectful. It makes the universe look 
poor, a conundrum not deserving a guess ; a nest of 
boxes, with much pains opened, to disclose nothing in 
the last. Contempt of the Creator and of his creation 
comes from self-contempt. The miracle of his glory 
is to beget children, as Saturn adorns himself with his 
rings. 

Materialism is an apology for ignorance. It has but 
one maxim, that everybody is devoured by the Sphinx. 
It is celebration of surface and despair of knowledge. 
It scofls at the deepest sentiments of humanit}', by drop- 
ping God and Heaven as fancies or whims. But he 
who specifies what we can have no notion of has some 
notion of it himself. Every negative is a positive. 
God is unknowable, you say. Is God to you but a 
word ? What business, then, have you to say about him 
so much? It is saying a great deal, to affirm he has 
no inventory or manifest, and is inferior to any house- 
holder or master of a ship. You have no right nor title 
to say you know nothing of what you know nothing. 
The subject to you does not exist. The materialist has 
no account to offer of Nature or man : only that the 
particles in one arrangement present beauty in form 
and color, without life ; in another, unconscious organs ; 
in a third, creatures deceived with an imagination that 
they are not machines. What is the imagination, that 
inner eye? From him no reply ; but that the atoms in 
one collocation digest, in a second secrete, in a third 
assimilate, in a fourth feel, or reason, or love, or illu- 
sively appear to will, 

12 



178 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Materialism climbs over the sides of the pyramid, or 
sits akimbo on its top, but explores not the interior, 
and denies it has any door. It is a spy reporting the 
nakedness of a land flowing with milk and honey. On 
the materialist's chart, the whole spiritual region, like 
one point of the globe, is put down as " No man's land." 

What of any interest or importance in human life 
can he explain? A certain multiple of those elements, 
his only counters, composes a round stolid mass, wheel- 
ing eternally dumb through the sky. A few of them, 
otherwise disposed, form a human figure that sees and 
speaks, sparkles with genius or glows with desire, and 
sends shocks of affection through another with which 
it has a deeper than chemical affinity ; or thrills us 
with combinations of argument and imagery, never 
heard of on the planet before and making all things 
new. One of these shapes, with its few score pounds 
avoirdupois of flesh and blood, we call Moses ; another, 
Caesar, Isaiah, Shakspeare, Christ. But law-giver, 
commander, poet, prophet, redeemer, or saint, comes 
out of the retort according as the atoms are mixed, 
and the blind fingers sift ! Such a theory is too great a 
demand on the faith which materialists despise. My 
credulity is great ; but, like a millionnaire in the city 
angry with the assessors, it refuses to pay so enormous 
a tax. How cheaply the unspiritual theory appraises 
those quick faculties of my friend, the nimble-tongued 
woman, that never fail in any jet of talk to deliver to 
my prosing dulness something fresh ! Can the quality 
of that young maiden, who just left my board, be 
analyzed.^ Can that purity, untouched and intangible 
by aught evil, be convicted as an outcome of the soil ? 



MATERIALISM. 1 79 

From these novel speculations, we learn that conscience 
is no voice of God or communion with rectitude, but 
calculation. Utility transformed makes that angel of 
lieht : and self-interest is the wonder-worker that turns 
out self-sacrifice from its lathe, projects every passage 
of devotion, and casts every scene of heroism in the 
whole history and long tragedy of mankind. The iron 
selfishness, which some alchemy contrives to convert 
into the gold of disinterested deeds, is itself transmuted 
clay. I can read Hebrew from right to left, but not 
spell creation with this alphabet. I cannot get one 
from many, but the many from the one. Where is 
that One ? as Philip asked Jesus : point him out ! He 
is the artist that does not thrust himself into his work. 
I went into a studio and admired the sketches, in char- 
coal and water-colors, that lined the walls. But where 
was the friend that drew th&SQ facsimiles so lively of 
the house and headland, the boat and the bay.? No 
sign of palette or easel, painter or brush, anywhere to 
be seen ! The design so exquisite, the skill so perfect, 
the tints so true, and every shape solid in this re-crea- 
tion of Nature ; but the hand withdrawn ? Room for 
all to appear to advantage but the one that did it all. 
For her no nook nor corner where I could conceive she 
was bestowed! Shall we doubt the First Artist is^ 
because he nowhere draws himself.? 

We cannot separate motion from will, mobilization 
of an army from the general, or of the funds from a 
financier. The wires of the electric cable are not 
wrapped closer than this faith. An English authority 
aflfirms it as an indisputable axiom of science that life 
comes only from life, never from death. But life is in- 



l8o RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

distinguishable from movement ; and who has reached 
the Hmits where life and death part? Death is still 
and cold ; and how stark and stiff we have thought 
large part of the creation ! Sepulchres are hewn in 
the rock, whose helpless mass seems fit enclosure of 
the corse that shall leap or walk no more. But motion 
is no absentee from the stone. " The dance of death" 
continues in what we consider dead, and disproves 
death with rhythm the unarmed eye cannot see, and a 
music of spheres, infinitely smaller than the orbs Shak- 
speare celebrated, which our ears cannot hear. A finer 
procession begins where the funeral ends, and ele- 
mental melodies laugh at the melancholy dirge. Tyn- 
dall's thesis, that heat is a mode of motion, resolves 
the universe. The figures in this cotillon are appointed 
by an intelligence identical w^ith command. There is a 
swarm not only in the beehive or the city street. Every 
wooden block is occupied and spinning under the feet 
that seek it for a support. The sea stretches off glassy 
and treacherous, as a place for unwary mariners to 
drown and die in. But the existence that sports in 
its huge bosom roughens the surface witli schools of 
fish that make mimic waves on its sv^ell, and spring 
out for a moment, with the universal disposition to 
break bounds into the air. From the bald eagle that 
sailed by me this morning, to the fly I discern only by 
his pincers on the back of my hand, is no interval nor 
cessation of activity. There is no passive voice in the 
world. Patience is a nobler motion than any deed. 
We never have so much will as when we say, Not 
mine. There is no stay. We must up and on : the 
bed or chair is intolerable unrest. In the arena is ease : 



MATERIALISM. l8l 

the rising sea drives me from the seat where I am 
writing my theme, and a heaving ocean of desire Hfts 
me to enterprise and accomplishment ever fresh. My 
boat is tossed and tosses me ; and in my heart is a 
pulsation chiming with my oar, a jet from the infinite 
pulse. The beat in my wrist refers me to that in my 
breast. To what does that refer but a will co-exten- 
sive with wisdom and equivalent to love? 

I sit in a skiff on the last ebb of the tide : the min- 
now swims through the transparency below, and the fly 
floats through that above ; an infant-crab creeps, and 
a minute flounder, simulating the sand, ploughs on the 
bottom, while a horse-shoe steers along with his rud- 
der of horny tail ; bits of eel-grass glide with their 
shadows ; the long sea-weed waves on the surface in 
the wind, its glittering tips casting down prismatic 
tints, spots of rainbow that move over the bottom of 
the sea, which is pierced with little holes through 
which the clams suck, and breathe back with bubbles 
that ever rise and break without noise ; the drift of 
clouds overhead is reflected in the mirror under foot; 
a slight ripple glances the last subdivision of the ocean- 
swell that lifts my little vessel softlier than a babe on 
the mother's breast ; the surf a mile away tumbles on 
the rocks, beyond my island break-water, with a force 
no frigate could resist. And all this on a morning as 
gentle as ever shone. No will nor meaning, says the 
materialist, in the whole ! Then how prolific is igno- 
rance, and what a busybody death ! 

How much motion is represented, beside what is 
seen ! The wave rises and washes some invisible par- 
ticles from the clifl'. But what imponderable tons in 



I $2 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

unreckonable ages have been washed from every 
promontory and ragged seam ! The rude sculptor 
of the sea, shouldering to his work, chips finer than 
any chisel an atom at a time, smoothing into what 
beauty, carving with what grandeur, the mighty block ! 
The green tongue of land that divides the quiet bay 
from the stormy deep has been moulded into curves 
passing any mathematics to compute. Yet all the 
tendency to this exquisite result is without intent ! 
We are not able or allowed to spell a syllable in the 
volume that has no preface or finis. We are looking 
over an album in which no photographer had a hand. 
We are walking through a crystal palace whose pillars 
were set with no plumb-line ; and it required no eye 
in the making of what we behold ! But will is power 
knowing what it is about, whoever may please to 
esteem himself accident or resultant of a blind force, 
that cannot, like the Cyclops, even feel round. Through 
countless variety all the cogs are carried with one wheel. 
The strength that raises a child's finger rolls the bil- 
low and the orb ; and the hydrostatic paradox is wher- 
ever Infinity is balanced by a drop. 

Spirit cannot be parted from matter. We worship 
God as Spirit ; but we cannot conceive him out of 
Nature. No more can we so conceive the human soul 
unclothed, but, as Paul said, clothed upon. Hence 
the difficulty always felt of imagining immortality 
without the body. So for their dead kings the Egyp- 
tians built, in the Pyramids, houses more splendid 
than any palace, and embalmed the flesh. Was theirs 
a superstition of which we are rid? There is, in 
Greenwood Cemetery, a mausoleum of such cost that 



MATERIALISM. 1 83 

the fortune intended for the occupant Is inherited by 
her dust ; and a Greek temple in Mount Auburn 
casts into the shade with its beauty many a country 
church. Our horror of the resurrectionist arises 
from our superstition of a resurrection. The good 
Boston doctor, who bequeathed his body to the dis- 
sector's knife, doubtless had been annoyed by it. When 
the Indians were removed, their being driven from the 
graves of their fathers was the peculiar aggravation 
of cruelty on which Congressional orators dwelt with 
a pathos it w^as poetical to think the roving tribes were 
conscious of themselves. Yet furniture for future use, 
weapon or ornament, was put into the warrior's tomb ; 
while the Chinaman, after his California toils are over, 
can fancy no rest for his remains but on the side of 
the globe where he was born. The resurrection of 
the body — a spurious phrase, substituted for the New- 
Testament resurrection of the dead — is printed in all 
liturgies, and the mortal relics committed to the ground 
" in hope of a general resurrection at the last day." Is 
it possible friends suppose these dissolving frames will 
sprout from the soil or be mechanically restored ? This 
gross belief is, however, not without ground. It is 
founded on an idea as true as it is necessary, — that 
without form or matter spirit is lost ; the mistake being 
that this identical matter, our familiar garment, will re- 
cover from the trance of death. So we cannot quite give 
it up. In my neighborhood, a little boy, attempting 
to bathe in a race-way of the ebbing tide, was swept 
away and drowned, — Nature herself undertaking to be 
both minister and service, shroud and procession, prayer 
and dirge, sexton and grave, with her salt caves and 



184 ' RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

sounding tides. But from such disposition of the dear 
body the town was in revolt. Crowds hung along the 
beach, peered into the channel beneath the draw, and 
put forth in boats to hunt it up out of its wide wander- 
ing sepulchre. Field-pieces were brought and dis- 
charged from the deck of a.vessel sailing to and fro in 
the harbor, hoping by the concussion to start the morsel 
of humanity from its lurking-place in the briny ooze, 
so wholesome and sweet. Before the time the apostle 
names, the Sea was called to give up her dead. Was 
it all sympathy with the afflicted, otherwise in many 
v^ays expressed? Was it a feeling that the soul could 
not survive the loss of its perishing robe? Did it hint 
the lingering strength of the notion that associates it 
so indissolubly with its habitual form, and imply a 
rational view that its projection without form is impos- 
sible to conceive? The physicist laughs at the Romish 
or Episcopal official's notion of perpetuated flesh ; yet 
the physicist admits no individual immortality without 
a reassembling of the particles we are each one com- 
posed of now, thus meeting the ecclesiastic in the 
same philosophy. If both could learn a human per- 
son's independence of any given set of particles, 
neither need scorn the other ; and the discovery how 
delicately the threads are woven in Nature's loom, how 
her strongest is her finest stuff, and how she hides her 
everlasting principles, the thunders of her power, in 
imperceptible atoms, and not in bulk, suggests continu- 
ance in safe investment. 

The whole is inseparable from the one. Materialism 
is disintegration. The infinite divisibility of matter is 
an axiom in mechanics : is its infinite multiplication 



materia:. ISM. 185 

an account of the universe? An Anti-Darwinian said 
it is not from one, but an ocean of germs. But, to get 
the one out of many, thought labors in vain. What is 
the whole which the materialist posits as greater than 
any Personality, or God? It is the general impression 
of the world. But this is no whole. It is infinitesi- 
mal part. To talk so of the whole is absurd. We 
say we see the earth, ocean, or sky, with but a trifling 
arc or section of either in our view. When a traveller 
came in sight of Sebago Pond, wide stretching and 
ruffled by the wind, she asked if it were not the Atlan- 
tic. We say Columbus discovered the Western hem- 
isphere in an outlying island. That referred to the 
continent ; the continent, to the globe ; the globe, to the 
constellations, swimming in immensity like mites in 
the waste or motes in the air. The integrity of Nature 
cannot be reached by our observation or generalizing. 
No induction of particulars or deduction of logic is its 
measure. It is Thing of pure Thought. Like integrity 
of character, it is no construction of distinct portions, 
or polyp-growth resolvable into endless individuals ; 
but implies simplicity of absolute centre, from which 
all the virtues radiate, and of which every word of 
wisdom or deed of goodness is a beam. The man 
worthy of his name is never in pieces ; is not many- 
sided, but circular, meeting you with one line of 
beauty at every point. God is the sphere in which 
innumerable circles, great or small, are contained. In 
every earthly inch and throughout celestial leagues is 
one uncontainable Container, reducing countless ob- 
jects, circumstances, persons, and events to the Being 
from which they proceed. For Being is no multiple, 
but always and for ever One. 



1 86 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

But, the materialist will ask, does the Spiritualist 
attain to unity? Is he not vagrant, in variety beyond 
all compass, entangled in the meshes of the net whose 
drag we cannot escape more than fish can the seine in 
the stream? Here is the reply: We cannot compre- 
hend or imagine the Person or Unity which is God, 
but we can think it. Eternity, Infinity, is our Thought, 
though like the peace that passeth understanding, or 
the heaven eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the 
heart of man conceived. My identity with it I feel, 
but cannot describe. Of the enthusiast who declared 
" I am God," it was said, he is right, though the 
words were false the moment they left his mouth. 
Our doctrine admits no proof, all proof being less cer- 
tain than itself. It is open to criticism and scorn, 
spite of which it will not cease to be affirmed and to 
affirm itself. 

We cannot explain the lowest forms of life by im- 
portation of properties from the air and the soil. My 
friend picks up in the pasture a red berry which has a 
pleasant taste, but whether it be poison she cannot 
tell. Who can elucidate the difference which deter- 
mines the flavor of an apple or peach ; or of meats, 
which some have not a palate keen enough to distin- 
guish with the eyes shut ; or of wines, for which a 
certain judge had a tongue so nice as to detect a savor 
of iron from a key having been dropped into the cask ? 
The wisdom, from whose herbarium all the grasses 
came, like varieties of architecture and stuffs of the 
loom from the master's designs, ordained the many- 
colored orb of human genius to outreach all the pat- 
terns of palaces and colors of woven silk and wool. 



MATERIALISM. 1 87 

The derivation of spirit from matter implies a time 
when spirit was not. Some lonely little vesicle wan- 
dered in the void womb of a universe ! When I can 
put myself into my own crucible, rake myself out of 
the ashes of my own furnace, cut myself into pieces, 
and from Medea's kettle recover my youth, take my 
perceptions back into their materials, and be revivified 
from elemental dust, I may expound the process of 
creation of which my intuitions and imaginations are 
the end. But our cradle is farther off than our tomb. 
It were easier to find where Moses was buried, though 
no man knoweth his sepulchre to this day, than where 
he was born, if by birth we mean that by which Moses 
was made to be himself, and not Aaron or Pharaoh. 
Our knowledge finds everywhere a wall, if our won- 
der do not turn it into a way to Infinity. I sit in a vein 
of trap-rock, through which the granite has been eaten 
out by what the Greek poet called the foaming tusks 
of the sea. Midway in the horizontal shaft the once 
overhanging cliff has fallen to fill a section of it up. 
The stone has disintegrated into soil, and in the soil 
vigorous oaks have sprung to overtop the level whence 
came the support of their own roots. The total is 
beauty, which no camel's hair pencil with all the pig- 
ments could improve. Give me the methods, material 
equivalents, and exact time required for the picture so 
as to leave adoration out, and I will set you then the 
harder problem how beauty has come into a thought, 
a character, a gesture, a gait full of grace, or the human 
face divine, with no intent to lift our eyes above the 
earthly floor. Is matter such an accomplished posture- 
master it can take all the attitudes of perfection and 



l88 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

faultless propriety of motion unawares? Delsarte 
would generate eloquence, like electricity from cushion 
and cylinder, by a study of the language of facial and 
bodily expression, to every syllable of which only 
passion and inspiration first gave vent. This theory 
puts artifice for art, cuts the train of oratory and action 
from the locomotive of feeling, would conjure things 
signified out of their signs, subordinate the everlasting 
to the mechanical, and dispense pulpit and rostrum 
from the need of any inward affection. But no such 
juggle can create truth. We cannot extract mind 
from earth, as by successive processes in a refinery the 
black juice of the cane becomes white as wheaten 
flour. Reason is absolute. It accepts not its costume 
of matter for its creator, any more than would the 
French monarch the state robes which Thackeray in 
his pen-sketch sets up for his royal self. The marble 
mountains of Carrara move not out of the sceptic's 
way for any dispute or ignorance of their origin ; and 
the moral sense is so positive that from all speculation 
Kant retreated on it for fundamental trust, like Wel- 
lington on the Torres Vedras from the open field. 
How selfish utility mounted into spiritual tenderness 
and strength would puzzle Minerva to tell. " I cannot 
allow myself," said a man, " to eat a pear by myself: 
I have to carry it home." Who told Theodore Parker 
not to kill the little spotted turtle basking by the brook? 
Ezra S. Gannett would not let me have my newspaper 
back till he had folded it precisely as he took it from 
my hand ! I sit among the rocks before the spectacle 
of the sea that rolls and breaks in thunder at my feet. 
In no other way is sublimity brought so near. But 



MATERIALISM. 1 89 

why am I uneasy and discontent ? Why not abide and 
enjoy the marvellous scene, letting the day pass, and 
Time shake his hour-glass as he will, while such luxury 
of the imagination, beyond all feasting, is mine? Be- 
cause I am alone, and my companion is needful to 
perfect my delight. You say it is an elixir of utilities ; 
it is the compound interest of selfishness ; it is a divi- 
dend on the policy of mankind : but that the main 
chance were susceptible of such gradation, and brute 
appetite could graduate humanity like a lily from the 
mud, we should all have been a pack of gluttons and 
thieves ! I decline this origin of glory. I will find in 
no such dross the making of my heavenly crown. 

In all nobility is an unborrowed charm. A child of 
five summers takes my case in hand for counsel from 
her curly head, and warns me not to stand on the plat- 
form or jump from the moving cars. What concern 
has the little maiden in my hoary head and nearly 
spent life? Has she calculated the account of profit 
and loss in my departure or longer stay? Is not the 
gentle disapproval of my rashness part of a generous 
instinct which comes out to touch me more in the 
sober smile than in the monitory word ? I should as 
easily suspect a miserly computation in the motherly 
hen's scratching for her brood close by. The abysses 
of the sea are beneath those white caps blown up by 
the south wind ; and from more fathomless deeps of 
the human bosom rises every spell of honor and 
truth. 

I am positive^ says some reporter, in whom we may 
mistrust some mixture of will with knowledge. But 
the will which positivism, materialism, phrenology, 



190 



RADICAL PROBLEMS. 



and the metaph3^sics of Jonathan Edwards, not know- 
ing what to do with and unable to explain it, unani- 
mously deny, declines to leave the lexicon or the world. 
We make a convert of the man ; but the will is not 
convertible into any particular motive. If it would 
only confess itself to be a sequence, a link in the chain, 
no cause, but one of an endless row of effects, how 
well we should comprehend it ; and in our philosophi- 
cal cabinet lay it as a labelled specimen on the shelf! 
But it declares itself to be more than intelligence. 
It testifies not that it has, but is motive. In a saint, 
like Jesus, it declares itself part of the will of God, 
as it must be in every man, who is his child, in every 
filial act ; for this unscientific, wilful veto on the will 
cannot stop with human nature, but must defy the 
Divinity. If the universe have a throne, and be not 
an automaton, freedom is the birthright of man. 

But how get from our idea of God to the fact.f* 
We deny the chasm ! As there is no void in Nature, 
but the opposite banks that frown at each other are 
united by space and air and magnetic circuits as closely 
as by timber and steel at the St. Lawrence River or the 
Menai Straits, so subject and object cannot be severed. 
Some identity makes them one. " Know thyself" is 
a profound proverb, because self-knowledge is the 
knowledge of God. The prodigal came to his father 
when he came to himself. No absence of God where 
is a man, or of man where is a God ! The same im- 
mense, positive, universal Root abolishes all but sur- 
face difference, and allows no negative. Life is the 
fact ; and death, the shadow it appears to cast, is part 
of itself, the ghost of life, as all apparitions are shades. 



MATERIALISM. I9I 

There is a doom on every scheme of pure criticism. 
Not by counter-criticism, but want of vitality, will it 
fall, as trees said to be winter-killed perish of the 
summer-drought that has drained their sap. As in 
morals, so in the intellect, the worst fault is fault-find- 
ing. A strong organism insures longevity. I saw a 
prostrate trunk, half-rooted in the ledge and soil, each 
branch of which on the upper side had made a soil of 
the parent-bole, and shot up into a perfect tree with 
boughs and sprays of its own. Any thing is possible 
to bountiful being, to amplitude of soul. But the poor 
and juiceless denier, subsisting by attack, like the 
mosquito on the blood of its victims, leads a precari- 
ous life, and will soon be blown away by the wind in 
some little heap of his fellows as useless as himself. 

But must we not define, stake out our roads and 
bounds of our dwellings, and have gates not only to 
open, but shut? " We cannot live," cries the conserva- 
tive, " out of doors." We may well consider if we do 
not live too much in doors for our virtue and our 
health ! Has the close air of churches any better 
quality than that of other houses or shops ? To what, 
asked my friend, do you owe your recovery? To per- 
petual open air, I replied. Air, light, water, earth, 
the four elements with their ever-fiowing magnetism, 
the only medicine-chest from which I have got any 
good. All close communion is unwholesome. Camp 
of Indian, haunt of Bohemian, wandering of gypsy, 
are more salubrious. I grudge every hour frost and 
storm drive me in from the roof where — 

" Tenderly the haughty Day 
Fills his blue urn with fire ; " 



192 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

or '"'' fretted with other golden fires " at night. " I call 
this going in, not out," said Edward Everett when he 
walked abroad. We need ecclesiastical ventilation. 
When the lamps burned low in the North-End meet- 
ing, and the oil was complained of, the merchant told 
the worshippers to find the difficulty in their deoxy- 
genizing breath. Was the atmosphere any better for 
the mind ? But the old confinement has given way to 
a gracious allowance, in some quarters, that we can 
worship in the woods. Thank God for this big play- 
ground for his children's recess ! Not a few roods of 
land in Boston or Hartford, but the earth is our com- 
mon, which no Internationals can cut into strips as 
numerous as the population. Beyond private rights of 
legal possession it is an undivided patrimony. One, 
asked if he were owner of a line of coast, replied, 
How absurd to presume to own shore or sea ! My 
idol, like that of ancient idolaters, is made of stone. 
But it was fashioned by no tool in human hands. The 
elements of wind and wave were its sculptors ; the 
promontories measure its stretch ; and through un- 
measured leagues of its proportions it is vocal with 
the praise I lay, a sacrifice, on its shrine. 

Every thing is affirmative. Denial is but the hem 
of definition. JVay is the condition of Tea, which is 
unconditional. Every creature adds : the coral-insect, 
his reefy sepulchre ; the worm that eats the mulberry, 
his silken tomb ; the spider, his web, that pays in beauty 
before the broom sweeps it away. The bee is a 
sugar-refiner of Nature's most concentrated sweet, like 
human creators of good finding in his hive his grave. 
The objector, the contrary person, has no business. 



MATERIALISM. 1 93 

Your amount of righteous will is your warrant. The 
pious man says, " I have no will." He should say, No 
wish. It was not his will, but his wish, Jesus resigned. 
Self-renunciation is not surrender of will. The will 
is never so strong as in giving up, for principle and the 
common weal, self-interest or sensual delight. 

Every thing is excellent in the ratio of its positive 
force. Free Love and Free Religion are the phrases 
of the day. But freedom is of no worth save to ex- 
press truth, and conform to the divine order. Love and 
Religion are not choices, but inspirations and necessi- 
ties, the laws as well as liberties of our being. They 
are stones in gear to grind our daily bread, but falling 
they grind to powder whoever would shift them to 
the service of his passing whim. Personality is the 
secret and circle of the world. We doubt immortality 
because we count personality the accident, not the 
essence of our nature. But it is the composer as well 
as the tune. By statutes, that cannot be repealed 
because never passed, every genuine concord comes : 
in a symphony of Beethoven, in a harmonious affec- 
tion, in a word fitly spoken on the smooth wheels of 
opportunity, or a pure and happy deed. To sacrifice 
yourself is impossible. God cannot sacrifice you ! 
Only some unworthy propensity — obstinacy, vanity, 
pride — can be sacrificed, as much below yourself as 
the ram Abraham caught in the thicket was below 
Isaac his son. Never was man less a victim, and 
more a victor, than Jesus on the cross. 

The opinions of most people are accidental. The 
minister or professor does not succeed, and imputes 
his failure to the system or sect he trains under, or to 

13 



194 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

partners who will not see his merit, — unlike the brave 
clergyman, who said he stuck to Orthodoxy because 
he was Orthodox : " the company was not much ! " 
If the person is greater than his creed, he carries it. 
If he is less, and wins no promotion, he bolts. If the 
platform is old and rotten, it trembles under the tread 
of every strong man. But the soul is one with its 
faith. 



VIII. 

SPIRITUALISM. 

'T^HIS seems a misnomer. It means the material- 
■*• ism of sjDirits, so much of heaven as can be 
manifest to mortal senses. But pure spirituality is 
impossible, in God or angel or man. 

"For soul is form, and doth the body make," 

writes the poet. Seneca says it is a mistake to think 
the surface is the inferior part of a man. Goethe de- 
clares : " O Philistine ! there is no inside." Beauty 
and wit and love come out. All the explorations of sci- 
ence are on planes of inconceivable thinness. As the 
soul opens, it knows it is not in the body which it uses 
and contains ; but is as much more than that as the 
atmosphere than the earth, or ether than the stars. 
The Turkish cadi asked Layard, " Wilt thou see 
heaven with thine eyes ? " Death will not benefit us 
if it blinds. 

But Spiritualism does not abide fair experiment, 
like electric, chemical, or planetary laws. It cannot 
endure sceptics, in whose presence all other opera- 
tions of the world go on without superfluous modesty. 
It has not been made to bear on any practical welfare 



196 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

of man, — to rescue those exposed to wreck or famine ; 
to comfort any in sorrow, save its own devotees ; to 
detect the sealed number of a bank-bill, though great 
reward was offered ; to add a mite to the store of 
knowledge ; or to charm intellect or fancy with any 
rare rhetoric of words. Whether Jackson or Morton 
discovered anaesthesia, a disembodied spirit did not. 
It was not beforehand with Leverrier to announce 
the new planet, or with Daguerre in the photography 
it applies to cherubic portraits. The great souls it 
re-presents to us have so retrograded as to make the 
anticipation of our own immortality an alarm. Frank- 
lin, in its introduction of him, is inferior to Poor Rich- 
ard and his old newspaper, and makes no show so 
grand as with his knuckle drawing the spark from his 
paper kite. Swedenborg does not see, nor Washing- 
ton behave, nor Webster speak so well as in the flesh. 
Milton's poetry and Parker's pith are gone. The rev- 
elations make backsliders of all men. 

Is it that the struggles of the departed for self-pub- 
lication fail on account of imperfect mediums.? It 
was said of an artist. All his pictures are full of the 
east wind. Over all their communications runs a 
blur. Spiritualism seeks the shade, twilight, drawn 
shutters, and a closed-up box for its performances, as 
it did midnight in church-yards. Its children are not 
of the day. I have heard of painters who would put 
their drawing of a flower where only a single ray 
would fall on it for the best effect. But the cardinal 
blossom I picked required no such bolstering of gloom. 
The more it was brought into the light, so that the 
sun shone in and round and through its leaves, which 



SPIRITUALISM. 197 

no palette can match, the handsomer it became. For 
people or pictures one law : how do they bear being 
exposed ? Michel Angelo told the anxious sculptor to 
set his statue in the public square. 

Yet Spiritualism is a genuine attempt to handle 
that problem of existence which puzzles the young 
child whom we see putting on its considering-cap to 
know why it is here, and who is responsible for its 
appearance. Somebody it is evidently determined to 
call to account. The riddle it begins to guess at we 
have not finished, and Gabriel or Uriel will never 
solve. 

But are the facts of Spiritualism fairly dealt with ? 
" They are not in Nature," says an eminent naturalist. 
That is, he has not found them. Does he assume to 
know all that is in Nature, and exhaust in his classes 
and categories her sum? The gods laugh at him, 
as he does at any preceding tribe of naturalists assert- 
ing for their surve}' eminent domain. Said my class- 
mate, to the senior Professor Ware, of the a priori 
proof, " This is unintelligible." " Would you not 
better say," answered the venerable head that swung 
its pendulum so justly between opposing views, " that 
you do not understand it.?" No superstition of the 
Church is so gross as that of the scientist that he has 
mastered the creation in his formulas, and can rule 
out phenomena not encountered in his field, on the 
ground that they are not among the contents of the 
creation. Is he as chosen clerk to take an inventory 
of her effects? The theories that have been already 
surrounded and overthrown show how scientific and 
ecclesiastic dogmatists are blood relations falling out, 



198 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

as vice fights with itself in another person. He is 
fool, as theologian or physician, who fancies no circle 
yet to be drawn will circumvent him. Give us your 
criterion of incredibleness. 

But there is a second objection to Spiritualism on 
the score of religion, urged by Christians who hold 
the supernatural view, and are disgusted with the spu- 
rious miracles and pretended apparitions of the new 
faith. This is a family quarrel about a supposed will 
of God, under which one party claims all his curiosi- 
ties, and a monopoly of prodigy, with which it is sac- 
rilege to interfere. We forget the absurdity of isolated 
portents. Whatever has happened may occur again, 
and must accord with law. Half a dozen ghosts in 
Palestine, to please a few spectators on the Hebrew 
stage, and none beside in all history throughout the 
sphere, were as tough as yesterday's most astounding 
tale. Christianity and Spiritualism, as popularly pro- 
fessed, rest on the same marvellous prop. Both main- 
tain human survival with external proof. As the eye 
sees that the duck or hawk which rises from the water 
is the same that dived ; as Sam Patch came up from 
Niagara as he went down, — so the ghost is seen to be 
the man we knew. But immortality is no matter of 
chronology. Bare continuance what noble spirit 
would accept? So the Florida cedar, that took root 
before the land was discovered, were better than a 
man. To be immortal is not to be the same, but 
another higher self every day ; so that by none, without 
a discerning love, we could be recognized. Goethe 
said Schiller had taken such strides as to astonish 
him. Milton's seeing his " late espoused saint " in a 



SPIRITUALISM. 199 

dream is grander than any of the gross apparitions. 
Let us behold our dear ones in pure vision " still far 
high advanced," rather than coming back in their 
earthly features and old clothes. These bodily resump- 
tions or perpetuations of familiar forms are but one 
step above the Morgue. The resurrection is no act 
of fleshly preservation, nor heaven a huge pyramid of 
Egyptian embalming. The soul will not stop with 
being translated : it must be transformed. The guise 
the departed return in hints a reduced condition, as if 
their absence had been one long diminuendo ; and in 
going to the other world the exchange had not been 
in their favor. But God has only one world ; and, in 
that, no conflict of laws, but progress through what- 
ever dark or devious passage. Jesus is descried by his 
followers exalted in a glorified form. If my vanished 
friends be not more wise and worthy, but only senti- 
mental talkers with but a fragment of their former 
character and remnant of their wit, show them not at 
all. Piety were charity, to walk backward with a 
mantle for the shame of celestial simpletons and do- 
tards, the sunken wreck of once fair women and 
brave men. Better go under than go down. A 
sailor, hearing ungenerous terms of salvation an- 
nounced, took his hat, and said, " I make over my 
chances to the rest of the company;" and, sooner 
than be the sort of angel some depict or disclose, let 
us ground arms in the battle of life, surrender our 
being, and face annihilation with a smile. 

It is a rational faith that the planets are inhabited 
and our vanished kin all around us. But are they 
eaves-droppers or tale-bearers? Will they give us 



200 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

ineffectual stammerings about their lot and our pros- 
pect, and lament their inability to tell us clearer or 
more? When they speak, the message will be unam- 
biguous as the last trumpet or the first song ! The 
soul stoops not to extraneous support. It does not 
endure being shored up. Out of the immortal nature 
immortality has no proof. Another's rising is no evi- 
dence of mine. Shall I cling to the skirts of Jesus, if 
God sees nothing worth saving in myself? 1 do not 
wish to live if I am not part of himself, or can fall out 
of his careless hands. Righteousness, strength, or sense 
I have none. All is his. The moment I claim it, it is 
gone. The saint owns not his sanctity. Christ resents 
being called good : the beauty is lost that has seen 
itself in the glass. But if I incur God's displeasure, 
I wish no one's rescue but his own ! I have value in 
his eyes, am part of his investment ; and the miracle 
is his projection of a creature individually distinguished 
from himself, when there is no personal distinction 
but for thanks, worship, and love. There is no de- 
monstration, then, of prolonged existence by sensible 
signs. But through aspiration the soul has for outfit a 
life-preserver in its own conscious tie with its Author. 
The lines it walks on are shot from the heavenly shore. 
No argument can be so strong as this interior sense. 
Though the graveyards should heave, and tombstones 
lean and fall, to let up the swarming myriads of the 
buried in all time, it were no assurance of my destiny 
comparable to my thought of God as my relation. 

But, amid the dissolution of old beliefs, Spiritualism 
has rescued millions from the sceptical gulf into which, 
as by a reaction-wheel from irrational systems, they 



SPIRITUALISM. 20I 

were plunged. Better make our ""prophet a mahog- 
any plank," than conclude there is no prophecy. 
Ridicule of Spiritualism, as a hysteric laugh over the 
charnel-house, is a poor substitute for the wildest 
dreams and most baseless visions. The gloom of cham- 
bers abutting on the grave, which to some is all that 
learning and culture and study of Nature supply, leaves 
scant superiority of reason or advantage for scorn of 
those who expect to appear in their familiar habit. The 
ascension-robes were prettier to look at than the pall 
and shroud. I was called many years ago to say the 
last words over the corse of a dear sister, whose kith 
and kin thought all that was left of her rested on the 
bier. They requested the service should be as simple, 
the words as few, the implication or committal of 
belief as little as it could be made by reducing, with 
selections and omissions, the Liturgy to its lowest 
terms. But why any ceremony at all.^ Wherefore 
not, without priestly pretence or hypocritical form, 
shovel the ashes into the hole ? What lingering relic 
of superstition, not quite as dead as the senseless 
frame, detained the dust, needing no more speech than 
any other clod ? We are so made that into the hard- 
est unbelief Hamlet's query of futurity will intrude. 
The human breast is a camera-obscura, from which 
every ray of celestial light cannot be shut out ; and 
Spiritualism has great odds in its favor against the 
Calvinism which put all the generations of men, with 
the exception of some Enoch, Elijah, or Jesus, under 
ground, to await a final summons. " You will find 
your mother," it said to the orphan, " when the affairs 
of the planet after myriads of ages are wound up." 



202 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

To this " hope deferred, making the heart sick," came 
the whisper, " Your mother wants to speak to you : she 
is present in the circle here." By no strategy were the 
lines of an army turned into such rout as was suffered 
by the believing host intrenched along the lines of 
apocalyptic pictures and apostolic tropes. The Spir- 
itualist's view was a stereograph ; the Calvinist's, thin 
as the earliest sun-sketch. This scarce less than eter- 
nal sleep ; this motion indefinitely to postpone our les- 
sons and lay our love on the table ; this dubious getting 
up out of decayed members and a conflagrated world ; 
this reassembling from the debris of Nature of count- 
less particles wandering and lost, — presented an un- 
welcome spectacle to the musing mind. As well lie 
where we were, or let our atoms thrive in other growth, 
as be disturbed so ! Rip Van Winkle's shorter slum- 
ber, to wake and find all so changed as to make his 
arousal a doubtful boon, seems a satire on so awkward 
and unconsoling a faith. 

If the Spiritualists be asked for proofs of their creed, 
they point to facts still taking place, as wondrous as any 
Jewish tales ; and Science shuts its eyes to phenomena 
it can neither explain nor resolve. Convicting thau- 
maturgists of some tricks does not bring all that is 
strange and incomprehensible under the ban. Noth- 
ing is more common in all history than the mixture of 
imposture with truth. Spiritualism must have the 
examination it asks. It cannot be dismissed with a 
jeer. Belief in the persistency of persons it has kept 
up. There was creeping over us a cold and cheerless 
monotheism, not only in the sense that there is but 
one God, but that a numerically one God is all there 



SPIRITUALISM. 203 

is to lift the earth and fill the sky. Sph-itualism peo- 
ples space with his escort and family. No longer so 
ghastly are the moon and stars. Nature is a swarm 
of creatures in glory, seen or with vanishing wings, 
as in pictures of the old masters ; so that the danger 
now is the Deity by its own offspring will be eclipsed. 
But the old swamp of a universe is redeemed. What 
were unfathomed ocean caves, and flowers wasting 
sweetness on the desert air, to the wilderness of an 
uninhabited world ! Somebody had been before my 
friend, and was perhaps with him, to see the meek 
" Rhodora " he thought so lovely, when he came. The 
charge of irrationality on supposing occupants every- 
where about us, though unrevealed, let us fling back 
on the contrary notion of inoccupancy. If it be pow- 
der in my ears, O infidel ! it shall be nitro-glycerine in 
yours. 

But do they actually, or can the departed lawfully, 
step over the dead line ? Were not two modes of being 
confounded, if so mixed? The answer is in no theory, 
but must be in the facts ; and if contempt of Spiritu- 
alism is a cover for scepticism of the soul's futurity, 
we must inquire what our basis is. If God could make 
me out of a shell, he can make an angel out of me. 
If my body be a resurrection from the grave of a 
trilobite, something finer than enters its own tomb 
may come out. If clay has mounted into my soul, 
how high shall my soul mount? What is the last 
graduation of the scale, on which nebulae rise into 
stars, and this well-clad planet is the phoenix of its 
own cinder-heap ; and Newton gets out of the balance 
he was so light in as a babe, to weigh the constella- 



204 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

tions ill his hand? Let the objector consider whether 
two kinds of facts are not classified together. The 
miracle of an uncommon is not of course an ille- 
gitimate event. An apparition is not usual. But 
would it violate any known law? The lame, blind, 
deaf and dumb, are cured by long treatment sometimes. 
Would sudden healing break the world's order? Blast- 
ing a fig-tree, or multiplying thousand-fold loaves never 
baked and fishes that never swam, were an affi'ont to 
reason, a floating of things from their foundations, a 
lie of Nature, so that we could not depend on her 
word. When the discovery of fossil remains and 
shells of extinct fishes was alleged to prove the planet 
more than six thousand years old, a clergyman asked 
why God could not have made the fossil bones and 
shells just as they were in their beds, having never 
served any living creatures for homes? It was asked, 
in reply, why God could not have created Hercu- 
laneum and Pompeii under ground, never having been 
cities on the surface or the habitations of men ! If 
any Being could do this, his doing it would be a lie, 
after which we could put in him no confidence, tell us 
to trust him however prophets might. He had ap- 
pointed us to meet him in a particular place, and 
not kept his tryst. We should not know what other 
promise he might break. God is faithful, and does 
not go back on us or on himself. He goes forward, 
and leads us to higher revelation without end. But 
seraphs coming as ghosts on earth, or mortals going 
as ghosts to heaven, are no burglars. Earth and 
heaven are but mansions of one house. It is God's 
extension to us his debtors. 



SPIRITUALISM. 205 

But the spectral demonstration there are those who 
neither reHsh nor need. They are above the middle 
air, in which these heavy-winged cherubim fly, that 
are like herons among birds, soon weary of soaring 
and e\^er ready with their long legs to light on the 
flats. Doubtless these frequenters from above of our 
lower atmosphere will turn out to be amphibious creat- 
ures, not permanently content with either element ; 
mediators on the fence betwixt the spheres, or a sort 
of insurance company for such as doubt the superior 
life. Spiritualism is spirituality run into the ground. 
Yet some must have celestial things made plain, as 
figures are chalked large for the dull-eyed or near- 
sighted. All Divine revelation is condescension to 
those who cannot gaze undazzled on the svm. Who 
are the philosophers to disdain its lowest degrees? 
The sage rebuked the savage for fondling his Deity, 
and addressing to it endearing words. But God 
rebuked the sage for repelling his child, really draw- 
ing nigh to him at the only point his ignorance could 
reach, as little ones walk to their parents with weak 
and wavering steps. What are all our approaches to 
the Infinite but as of babes that step and stumble, and 
venture on ? The boy or girl you see on a door-step, 
trying and straining to get hold of the handle of a 
bell, is an image of our best prayers. O metaphysi- 
cian ! are the Spiritualists coarse and you refined, or 
are they substantial and you vague in your speculations 
on the transcendent theme? The Future will decide 
the relative value of the stuff from their looms and 
the webs from your brains. 

Meantime let those who care less for the outward 



2o6 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

facts and more for the inward thoughts be thankful 
for the subject, which no meditation or disclosure ex- 
hausts. I too much enjoy my reflections to wish the 
matter cleared up. " Grandmother, what is glory ? " 
cried the lad learning the Lord's Prayer. I do not 
quite want to know. Let the New Jerusalem not be 
measured for me ! I desire not to be informed how 
many sorts or regiments of angels there are. Let 
something even of the certainty of bliss be reserved, 
and of the eternal blazon withheld ; nor the story be 
told till it become trite. The gladness of the supernal 
visitants to see us, and be able to manifest themselves, 
gets a little tiresome. We hope there is some secret 
they have not let out. We should be disappointed 
with Paradise, if what they say of it were all. Shall 
we complain that the Divinity is veiled, or in eclipse ; 
and the road of our destiny runs and turns out of 
sight? Let us rather rejoice in the hidings of his 
power, in promise of fountains we can never drain; 
and that the path is no turnpike stretching monotonous 
over the blazing hills, but winding and tempting 
through lonely hollows and thickets of mystery ! The 
descent of the valley of the shadow of death, so cool 
and private, is good for us, 'as well as ascending among 
the seats of the elders. With what rest and refreshment, 
on mossy beds and along noiseless streams, may it not 
prepare for new action and advance ! I bless my Maker 
for my joy to thlnk^ exceeding all pleasure of other 
appetite or possession, festal scene, beauty of prospect, 
or travel by land or sea. " I want more light," said 
my friend. But I am sure enough, because sure as He 
wills. I read in the religious sheet a lamentation over 



SPIRITUALISM. 207 

one, standing outside the accepted Christian faith, as 
therefore less convinced of happy survival of the dis- 
solving flesh. O critic ! is the vista clear and the jour- 
ney mapped out for you ? Are there no queries to be 
put, surprises to encounter, or discoveries to make? 
Yours then were the lot to be deplored ! 

Shall it be said there is something ungrateful in this 
craving for circumstantial knowledge beyond our pres- 
ent lot? One world to be in is enough at a time. Let 
us not grasp after the preternatural, which will be nat- 
ural in due season ; nor seek unto strangers after news 
of our ascended friends ; nor covet a support for our- 
selves in the dark valley beyond the rod and staff" leaned 
on by our race ; nor wish to degrade for our convenience 
or curiosity those promoted from the earth. A man 
once fell from an immense raft of logs on the Penob- 
scot, and disappeared in the foaming stream. A few 
days after, his employer, seeing what seemed his 
ghost advancing toward him, with the well-worn im- 
plement for arranging the logs in hand, cried out with 
horror, " Do not come back : you are welcome to the 
fork ! " Is there not something in the coarse and comic 
expression that goes seriously to the heart? What is 
the design of our friends' going, but that they may 
reach a higher state, and we get along without them, 
in outward presence and person, as well as we may? 
Shall God repent of and foil his own purpose, by or- 
dering at once their sensible return ? It were to belittle 
the majesty of bereavement, and discrown death of its 
glory, for a consolation so fleshly and weak. Parting 
is a lesson : shall the book it is written in be snatched 
away before it is learned ? The grave means something ; 



2o8 



RADICAL PROBLEMS. 



and, though it never held a soul, were too empty of 
significance, if the tenant walks out the day after his 
burial to mock us with his mortal shape. Let us not 
grasp at the treasure God hides, but be patient till he 
give it to us again as to the rest of mankind in his own 
way. To cleanse, not continue our fondness, he takes 
away our idols, and denies the familiar embrace. Our 
beloved leave our senses to lodge in our souls ; and 
the holy imagination, that works in their living sub- 
stance to shape them more finely than before, were 
baffled by gross presentment of their wonted form. 

That our virtue may be pure and sublime, God 
withholds the " eternal blazon " we seek. The saints 
of former ages trod their way unhelped by marvellous 
shows. They knew no distinction of nature and the 
supernatural. Nature^ in human knowledge of a 
lawful creation, is a modern entity ; and from the 
subject they mused on so intensely till the fire burned 
came the object that could be seen and felt in the air. 
It was their faith, not the fact, that was extraordinary, 
amounting to a second-sight. If angels went and 
ministered unto Jesus, in visible form, as of flesh and 
blood, he had the advantage of a succor forbid to us, 
and detracting from the truth and honor of his exam- 
ple. Who was there to lift him from his agon}^ in the 
Garden ; or help him, but Simon the Cyrenian, to 
bear his cross ? When he was mocked with the pur- 
ple, and pierced with the thorns, and drank the gall, 
there was none to stand by him but God. Invisible 
sympathy sufiiced. The same is too wholesome, and 
needful for our goodness from Him, that we should 
wish it neutralized or lowered in quality bv carnal aid 



SPIRITUALISM. 209 

of apparitions to touch us with warm hands. The 
struggle with pain and temptation is hard ; but let me 
have no superiority in it to my kind. " I am a stran- 
ger and pilgrim on the earth, as all my Fathers were." 
If I can share their fate, I am content with their lot. 
They ventured forth on unforeseen perils of an untried 
existence ; and I will follow in the same straits, hop- 
ing through fog and icy currents and driving storms 
to reach their warm Polar Sea. How corrupting is 
this mistaken vanity of being carried in some spirit- 
ual elevator above foregoing generations ! The im- 
proved arts and increased comforts dispense not with 
our working out our own salvation by effort and pa- 
tience equal to theirs. What we call the progress of 
society may hinder as much as it furthers the soul. 
Want of that vivid feeling of Deity which solved the 
world in wonder, and stamped any former time as the 
age of miracle, is proof of a decline in one direction, 
to match whatever general advance. 

Spirit is its own proof, which no rarefaction of mat- 
ter can reach. What signifies a street-full of ghosts 
if they teach me naught? The lively Frenchwoman 
said they were but mortals who, though dead, had 
never been able to go. Spiritualism has offset the 
scepticism of the market, but not disentangled the 
soul from sense. Its spirits are bodies ; and bound- 
less liberty between the sexes is the doctrine of one 
of its seers. Life is the test of honor or shame to our 

faith. 

14 



IX. 

FAITH. 

THERE is a feeling which it needs no science but 
close observation to know is shared by lower 
creatures ; by the cat rubbing round your leg, and 
the dog you may call Fido to signify his loyalty ; by 
the horse that owns your stroking of his neck, and the 
cow that takes your hand into her mouth, as well as 
by the babe sinking unalarmed to sleep on its mother's 
breast. It is dependence, a consciousness of succor 
and support. We call it religion, no definition of 
which suffices that makes it an act of the intellect 
or confines it altogether to man. It is the owning of 
superior power and goodness ; a sense of God in the 
soul : not the motion we make, but he makes in us, 
finding himself in our heart. It is a narrow measure 
that would put this Divine seizure into our understand- 
ing, and a false date that would derive it from our 
will. No pictui'e in Nature more touches a child than 
a fountain bubbling noiseless from the ground, carry- 
ing up a perpetual pillar of whirling sand, as firm in 
the water as that which moves in the caravan's sight, 
or once led Israel through the desert. It is an image 
of the well springing up unto everlasting life. 



FAITH. 211 

But this Faith is thought by many to be in suspense 
or passing away. Physical philosophy has drilled and 
blasted the old rock men rested and built on as eter- 
nal ; and people run every way from more expected 
explosions. Rome was not more moved by those ter- 
rible Gauls than is the Church by these uncompliment- 
ary barbarians — geology, astronomy, and ethnology — 
making havoc of her traditions and savage work with 
her sacred books. Study stops no more for priestly 
remonstrance than the train for a boy's pin on the 
rail. The last rag of belief seems about to be torn 
from us by ruthless hands. Not only Mormonism and 
serpent-worship are descended upon for gross offences, 
but a right to arrest Christianity is asserted by the new 
police. 

But the primitive granite cannot be blown up. Be- 
cause it has been found out that the world was not 
made in six days, but was a job too long to be done 
by any demiurgus ; that mankind cannot be derived 
from one pair ; that no single flood ever drowned all 
Nature ; that history is not fall, but an ever-ascending 
order ; and that the Bible has flaws for Colenso to 
point out in the Old Testament, and Strauss and Baur 
in the New, — is Faith destroyed? No more than a 
building by an architect's removal of a rotten under- 
pinning to plant his structure on the ledge. No record 
is exempt from critical tests, and the command of 
thought to move on. Jupiter and Venus, Mars and 
Mercury, and Saturn himself, are driven into lifeless 
names and sparkling points in the sky ; tormenting 
witch and enchanting fairy are gone, and not a few of 
our cherished forms and notions must follow. But 



212 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Faith survives out of dissolving superstitions, as the 
trees out of last 3?'ear's decaying leaves. 

Nor does Faith, like a feudal prisoner, live at the 
mercy of science, but is sovereign. Where were 
knowledge without motive of curiosity and confidence 
in something to be known? Lessing liked truth or cer- 
tainty less than the pursuit of it. Why care for it but 
from prior persuasion of a correspondence in the world 
with ourselves ; that things and thoughts are made fast 
with the same glue ; that creation is no confidence- 
game to cheat us with marked cards or loaded dice of 
laws broken in anybody's favor ; but, without one 
juggle, will justify to the end the inquiry it prompts. 
If Intellect be father this Faith is mother of sciences 
and arts. The scholar is led by some surmise, like the 
lamp in the miner's or hunter's cap casting its light on 
the dark. This column of fire and cloud in the mind 
gave Columbus his second-sight. The laws of matter 
come as ideas, those ghosts of the mind, before they are 
verified in facts. Newton's unity, or God's in him, 
revealed Nature's to him ; and no falling apple was 
more than a signal-ball. "Whither now?" asks the 
child of the angel, in Greenough's statue. Hope is the 
mind's angel-guide. Darwin admits the missing links, 
but clings to the organic unity. His faith cheers and 
halloos the hound of his understanding. Huxley can- 
not meet objections to his protoplasm ; but thinks the 
builder's brick, for this palace or mosaic, though too 
small to handle, will yet appear. He will furnish 
cement or inortar from his own mind. Because 
Goethe is no dualist, but a believer in the One, he 
finds in the sheep's skull a transformed vertebra ; in 



FAITH. 



313 



the fruit the leaf, and in all the colors of the rain- 
bow varying mixtures of light and shade. Do we 
call the child cunnings for the interrogation-point 
in its face? How it coasts along and circumnavi- 
gates its own little globe of flesh, finds its continent 
an island, becomes an individual, parts from God and 
begins to be afraid, and loses for a time its innocent 
wonder ! Age is not in years, but self-sufiiciency. 
Our octogenarians are lads in what is called the dark 
age, and misses in their teens. But the man reflecting 
becomes the child again. The moon-faced marvelling 
of the babe is shallow to that surprise of the unfolded 
mind which no deep-sea line of metaphysics can sound. 
The man believes so much, he is called infidel ; and 
atheist, for being intoxicated with God. The sanctu- 
ary cannot hold him, as the queen's court could not 
Talbot's troops. The fire is quenched by the sun of 
miracle. Cork up some supernatural drop to which 
all Nature beside is but "leather and prunella"? 
What is liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius to 
the circulation of the blood ; or the turning of water into 
wine at Cana to that on the Danube and Rhine ; or 
the money in the fish's mouth to the Australian mines ; 
or the blasting of the fig-tree to its growth ; or Joshua's 
brake on the sun to the rolling of its car ; or the spec- 
tre to the moon's light ; or a revolting resurrection 
of the body to the immortal life of the soul? I believe 
in Christ's healing, because all goodness heals. Said 
Edward Everett to an overweening solicitor, " You 
make me sick." True men and women are all physi- 
cians to make us well. Faith in God's works let us 
have. Any supposed counter-works or anti-works im- 



214 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

ply duplicity in his constitution. Like the love Shak- 
speare boasts, this world was builded far from " acci- 
dent." The paper account of it may be but credit 
mobile. But the Bible is not fountain nor river, but 
reservoir ; and, though it become a ruin, the spring is 
deeper than that lake Nyanza Baker found at the head 
of the Nile. The stream flows like the Euxine to the 
sea : it is a Danube to force its way through mountains 
of prejudice ; a St. Lawrence brawling over rocks of 
controversy ; a Niagara dropping to a different plane 
and deeper tide over the pitch of some tremendous 
reform, like Luther's ; a cataract ready for a new leap 
in that German mind, scorned as unpractical, but 
showing its double genius to speculate and act. 

We must not confound with the substance the acci- 
dents of faith. A scholar suggested to a churchman 
the unimportance of some rite. " Nothing is unimpor- 
tant that we stand on," was the reply. But why stand 
on trifles, any pulling of which from under our feet 
may trip us up } Forms and formulas are burrows of 
insincerity. " What is the difference in your farmer 
since his conversion ? " — " This, — that when he used, 
in cutting trees on Sunday morning, to carry his axe 
on his shoulder, now he carries it under his cloak." 
Chunder Sen arraigns English hypocrisy, sending the 
brandy-bottle with the Bible to India. 

Doubtless, faith must be nourished by scriptures and 
institutions. But it is congested when they become 
ends instead of means. Mr. Brindley had not much 
sense of beauty when he said the use of rivers was to 
feed canals ; and the beauty of virtue is gone when 
the canal of the Church is made the reason and end of 



FAITH. 215 

those affections which are the currents of the soul ; and 
God himself is considered part of the Establishment. 
Faith is the motion of love. Visiting a nephew of 
General Hardee, the writer on Tactics, I heard from 
the wife a complaint of the Northern soldiers who 
had trampled her orange-grove and spoiled the crop. 
I took some large oranges from my pocket and gave 
to her children, saying, " Here are some that have 
come back." — "I am beginning to have faith in these 
Tankees^^ she cried. A small kindness may be mother 
of a child of goodness that grows to be larger than 
herself. But whoever had a human friend he was 
not obliged to turn from to God? Said a nervous 
woman, " I have sometimes to tell my husband to 
go away.'* But so w^e never tell Him. 

But has Faith any hold on the future ? Let science 
answer. When Copernicus was told, according to 
his theory the planet Venus should have phases as 
well as the moon, he said, '' Wait till you have a tele- 
scope of sufficient power." Those phases were among 
the first things the improved telescope reached. From 
a resinous property he detected in the refraction of 
the diamond, Newton predicted the discovery that it 
is carbon. When the new planet appears, Leverrier, 
like Wordsworth's saint, but " sees what he foresaw." 
Morton risks murder for the blessing of ether to man- 
kind. Our punctual crossing the Atlantic by steam, 
and traversing its monstrous bottom with the electric 
cable, was once a prophecy. Quite alien from such 
cases is the prevision of that immortal sea we shall 
navigate when this poor flesh is a condemned vessel? 
Is Nature a subject for foresight, and human nature 



2l6 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

not? The anticipation of gold pavements, and houris, 
and luxurious boards, is the coarse working of the 
instinct. We must not expect to take our old coats 
and shoes with us. "How much did he leave?" 
"He left it all : he did not take a cent ! " But in 
spiritual immortality is nothing base. It is the unself- 
ing of the soul. Our hope of it is our honor of God. 
He does not play with us to give us a good time at 
any theatre of Vanity Fair, nor let us lick the hand 
just raised to shed our blood, but will justify our aspi- 
ration in a fact as sublime. " Whom God deceives is 
well-deceived," say you, O Goethe? Deceit of the 
inmost in us were self-deception in him. Forms will 
pass. When the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was 
called in question, a pious woman said, " If they take 
away the bread and wine, what shall we have left ? " 
But the light will remain, fall the shadows how they 
will. Sunday may lose its emphasis. Men may get 
along without ministers. " Your kingdom," said 
Charles Sprague to a clergyman, " is passing away." 
The triumph of the Church, as of its Head, will be 
in going from us. But the kingdom of God will not 
pass ; and that kingdom shall be a home. 

Faith is unity, the real atonement. Faith is one, in 
distinction from particular objects, be it fixed on God 
or Christ, Saint or Virgin, angel or mortal. The 
motto for a seal, / die where I am attached^ is 
graven on a vine twining round a pillar. But the 
fidelity is in the vine itself, whether climbing on a 
trellis or a tree ; and my trust in m^'^ partner's loyalty 
is as noble as in my Redeemer's sacrifice, or my Maker's 
faithfulness. The same principle clambers to heaven 



FAITH. 



217 



or clings to earth. It may make an idol of a stone or 
fetish of a man, but parts not quite with its own noble- 
ness. Holding to a bit of carved wood, painted image, 
woven flag, or printed creed, it implies invisible excel- 
lence or sufficient help, some reliance on the constitu- 
tion and Constituter of the world. In the yacht-squadron 
my friend's fancy saw a troop of hooded shapes glid- 
ing ghostly over the deep. I saw clouds of canvas 
bellying from the well-moulded hulls, guided by mor- 
tal hands of eager captains, who believed in the laws 
of wood and iron, water and air, and the triumph of 
the best model and sail and skill. In the sloop and 
schooner, that tried conclusions, leaving the rest in a 
helpless heap behind, was a figure of minds far ahead 
of their generation, of that proud majority which is 
but a confused multitude and lagging crowd. All 
faith is in law and lawgiver. Subscription to miracle, 
though exacted and crowned in the Christian Church, 
is unbelief. My friend exposes glass on his roof, and 
in due time the sun gives it a beautiful rose-color. If 
the sun do it this year, and refuse next, we could put 
no confidence in the sun, nor know but it would rise 
in a new quarter, or its furnace-register give out. 
Who could lean on a Being that played fast and loose ? 
How foolishly we talk of his making laws ! His laws 
were never made. They have not their birth in time, 
but are necessary in him, are himself, and cannot 
change more than he, — not card-castles he like a child 
is amused with building and throwing down. Not 
lack but fulness of faith rejects tales of unnatural 
transformation of water into wine, and green leaves 
into withered, or any substance unknown into silver 



2l8 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

coin. These are juggles, to which Perfect Wisdom 
cannot stoop. It is time miracle, as a test, were with- 
drawn. Those who cannot abide it the Church can- 
not afford to lose. Doubtless there are interpretations, 
like Dr. Bushnell's, by which the supernatural turns out 
to be the natural, and the portents are made as orderly 
as the procession. But will you lay persons, who can 
neither take them raw, nor cook nor construe them so, 
under ecclesiastic ban? 

Faith is distinguishable, next, from its statements. 
What men contend about is not the substance, but the 
form : the five points, thirty-nine articles, the scores 
of sacred books so uneasy ever since they were bound 
into one, the discrepancies in doctrines, narratives, 
or genealogies, and uncounted clauses and texts. My 
friend told me he thought " God must be sorry now 
he had a Bible, finding men quarrel about it so." Ex- 
pressions, unsatisfactory to those they are invented by, 
generate strife. Every church in Christendom is con- 
vulsed over the undermined language of its collect or 
creed, and all who stand on it are in fear of being blown 
up. Written dogmas, not shifting to correspond with 
the march of knowledge, are flanked. They cease to 
be sentiments, and become tenets grasped and held by 
the will. Some persons escape from the untenable 
forts of theology ; and some try yet to man the hope- 
less guns. The war becomes a Tnelee; and no man 
knows his opponent. The excommunicator finds him- 
self at heart excommunicated, with but some tatter of 
a phrase which for a weapon he has clutched. By 
the bishops that judge Colenso is he not secretly 
indorsed? Priests, like politicians, illustrate Talley- 



FAITH. 219 

rand's saying that the use of language is to conceal 
thought ; and the art of puttiiig things confounds 
candor with trick. Part of the clergy in every estab- 
lishment outgrow and chafe under the old cut of the 
uniform which from policy they still wear. Others, 
like mourners going from black to slate color, attempt 
to vary their costume by degrees, to take time by the 
forelock, and meet the coming wave. My brother 
would fain be free. On judiciously selected points he 
is outspoken, and wins credit of courage and being 
independent. But his boldness is not boldness. He is 
not loyal to his last and innermost belief. He thinks 
the time has not come, or the people are unprepared. 
He will work at the soil successive seasons before 
casting in the seed. But, had prophets waited till 
everybody was ready, would any reform have oc- 
curred? It is a battle of sentences, theologians now 
fight, more than of thoughts. All are on the defence. 
They are mouth-pieces of ancient divinity, holding 
proof-texts as shields over their heads. You are brave 
only in spots, O Orthodox or Episcopal friend ! Now 
and then, here or there, you deal a lusty blow at 
prejudice. But you have no mettle of principle, al- 
ways, everywhere, and all over. Dare to say as you 
think, — that there is no warrant but expediency for 
governing the Church ; no system of divinity in your 
symbolical books ; no authority for faith in the Bible 
or any printed word ; no evidence of immortality but 
in the immortal soul ; no God apart from Nature and 
man ; that every spirit can say with Jesus, " I and 
my Father are one ; " that the Divine unity consists 
eternally in its offspring, is in its activity, and in loss 



220 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

of its relations were itself deceased, — and your con- 
gregation might be as thin as ours ! 

Though we seem earth-wide and heaven-wide apart, 
faith is one motion in our minds. The collision is 
between the trains of word and theory. Some fresh 
conviction struggles for life out of worn-out schemes, 
as, from the gravel, which a past vegetation crumbled 
into, I admire to see the sweet rose and soft mullein 
spring. Happy is he by whose imagination, in some 
new proverb, it is voiced. Lonely as the seer that 
sat astonied, or as John the Baptist in the wilder- 
ness, he will be for a time. But soon he will appear 
a forerunner one party would expel and another win. 
" Go out," says the pope to Dollinger, yet begs confer- 
ence with the man more formidable than a rival pope ; 
" as if," wittily answers the great heresiarch, " the 
Father cared to have my body with him when he 
has excommunicated my soul." " Come," cry the 
Rationalists to the robust Romanist, " to swell our 
revenue ! " The Papal fear and Radical hope prove a 
common ground beneath personal pretensions and 
a belligerent vocabulary. 

For, thirdly. Faith, distinguishable from all partic- 
ulars of object or statement, is indistinguishable in 
itself. Other properties may be christened by its 
name. Pride and passion, sensuous music, gay archi- 
tecture, Sunday clothes, keeping one day holy, seeking 
God in a single place ; making the curtains of a tem- 
ple, the gems of a Shekinah, or the rafters of a meet- 
ing-house holier than all space ; removing the temple 
not made with hands to some heavenly distance, 
instead of trembling with joy in it all around and 



FAITH. 221 

every day ; thinking the Divinity can undergo shrink- 
age from the universe to a conventicle, — all this may 
be considered faith. But by the narrow mode its 
quality is not touched. In every age and nation which 
we call heathen, — through Buddhist and Brahmin, 
Mahometan and Chinaman, Indian of the Eastern or 
Western clime, sun or serpent worshipper, — a like 
feeling runs from one Source, with whatever stain in 
the stream. 

Faith is repose in the perfection of the world. Job, 
cursing the day of his birth, and wishing to cover it 
with night and be his own pall-bearer, was an infidel. 
Schopenhauer, flinging stones at the creation, as a 
worsted work that just rubs and goes, is prince of 
denying spirits. My friend, rejecting Christianity, is 
not a sceptic ; for he worships Truth, and never flinched 
in his persuasion, like Wordsworth's, that every thing 
is " full of blessings." He has less doubt in him than 
that infallible Pius IX., unable to foresee his own 
dethronement, vainly beseeching a conference with 
the recusant German scholar on points in dispute, and 
trembling before rebels he would cut ofl' but that they 
are protected by the foremost nation in the world. This 
friend fights a duel with history, assails the logic of 
events, considers mankind mistaken in what it remem- 
bers or forgets, holds his own recollection of more 
worth than the oblivion of ages, and Cato-like tells the 
gods they have prospered the wrong cause, which is 
an. accident that does not occur; but, by his temper 
of devotion and trust in the Most High, he is saved 
from all just accusation of unbelief. When shall we 
learn that one thing is sacred, — our thought? We 



222 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

assassinate our own liberty when we condemn our 
neighbor's. Liberal Christianity hates its offspring, 
like a parent scolding an inherited propensity in his 
child. But beware your prescription of terms ! Has 
the man no faith who sacrifices life to duty, thinking 
all is over, and expecting nothing beyond, — facing 
annihilation, and not asking to continue ? Demand ar- 
ticles of faith ? My love has none ; nor, when perfect, 
has my health. If I descend to particulars, and talk 
of my head, stomach, or heart, disease has begun. 
Soundness is the light and happy bearing of the whole 
frame, and faith of the undivided mind. Curiosity 
about our beginning, or. dogmatism about our end, is 
defection from Faith, which contemplates only exist- 
ence ; and, no more heeding death than butterfly or 
bird, sees only a path of morning-glory without end. 
Faith goes on, not needing to take an observation. It 
is no resignation of office or winding-up of affairs, 
but proceeding to do business, and not take off our 
clothes till we go to bed. It is like the Western 
pioneer, or traveller that halts for but an hour. The 
Yankee in Italy glanced at the Apollo Belvedere, and 
told his attendant to check it in the list of curious 
objects, as he must pass on ! His business was more 
important than the statue. The wanderer along the 
rock-girdled beach never finds just the place to pause, 
while Beauty coyly glides before to toll his feet. The 
man of science cannot rest, though he find out the chem- 
istry of the sun. The earth's poor clerkship or unread- 
able record keeps Darwin on the stretch. The intellect 
would circle the old with ever new generalization. 
Artist or inventor has visions that shed scorn on his 



FAITH. 



223 



performance ; and no character, even of Christ, without 
room for improvement. Faith means this conscious 
room. The infidel is he that asserts finality anywhere, 
makes a term of any achievement or conception, sees 
or puts a block in the eternal road. To affirm any stop 
or period is unbelief. How many the unbelievers in 
full communion on the church-books I Some astrono- 
mers say the earth will drop into the sun by and by, 
and be burnt up. Is he a believer who asserts a 
destruction of the world, ultimate loss of millions of 
souls, the running out of human nature, and ending 
of the race of virtue at the tomb, like an Olympic game 
at the goal, with the partial saving and crowning of a 
few victors elect.? Choice, confidential friend or pri- 
vate secretary of the Lord as he may deem himself, he 
does not properly believe at all. Faith is not such a 
murderer of hope. To vilify our kind, or despise 
ourself, is not belief. David, crying out he was con- 
ceived in sin and shapen in iniquity, was a blasphemer. 
He w^as a matricide, shouldering on the woman that 
bore him his own guilty lust : and they renounce God, 
with him, who quote his language to the point of 
a general fall and woe. 

Calvinism is a system of disbelief. To say God was 
disappointed in his works, repented of man's creation, 
got oft' the track with his engine, and botched his busi- 
ness so as to have to do it over again, is worse than 
atheism, — if Bacon be right, that, rather than have 
us think ill of him, God would not have us think of 
him at all. Faith is the feeling that creation is no bad 
job, bubble that has burst, or mine that will blow up, — 
but a master-piece, with no flaw. " The experiment 



224 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

has not succeeded," the Harvard professor used to say 
to his class, when acid and alkali failed of the intended 
combinations in his retorts. Has the great Experi- 
menter nothing else to say? To declare that tragedy, 
not triumph, was the end of Jesus ; that such a Son 
went under, with the heavens deaf and dumb to his 
prayer ; that the ruling Power said to him. Dust to 
dust is the doom, and your talk of ascension is a foolish 
whim, — so that, as in Richter's dreadful dream, now 
there is no Christ, — Orthodoxy would hold to be dire 
unbelief. What is it, then, to reckon the entire 
humanity cast away, with the exception of a favored 
minority snatched like brands from the burning, — God 
hard of hearing to myriads of souls in immemorial 
seons? A father's harsh chastening of his child brings 
universal blame ; and lately, in the West, certain citi- 
zens hung to a tree, not waiting for the law, an abuser 
of his boy. Yet v^e are all bound for prison, in the 
sentence of the schools, — except the redeemed, who 
seem like courtiers obsequious to a tyrant because per- 
sonally safe. But to crook the knee to such a despot 
for his power were the meanest slavery on earth. 
Faith is, that there is no such fatality ; but as the sea 
in God's chariot of cloud is a cleanser of the air for 
man's breath, while making every wave a span of 
beauty to bridge all lands, so an ocean of purity is 
sufficient antidote to all sin. Faith says that no 
hurt goes to the centre, no stain is too deep to take 
out, no wound which Divine surgery or cautery cannot 
tent. The soul cannot mortify. The stuff we are 
made of is so stout the texture never rots. I heard a 
reformer say. There is essential evil, heart malady in- 



FAITH. 225 

curable, an everlasting scar, a consequence of folly we 
can never get over, but must be left hopelessly behind, 
like one that gives out on the march, or a vessel that 
lags in the race. Melancholy want of faith ! Total 
depravity or everlasting penalty? Why argue against 
it, when, if it be, there is no God, there being nothing 
total but him ! Even sin has a ministry, and is one 
of God's sharpest tools. The vilest criminals on the' 
scaffold without hypocrisy commend to him their souls. 
" The mystery of iniquity" teaches some clear lessons. 
If our preaching lose edge in making light of it, the 
edge is turned in declaring so universal an experi- 
ence of no use. Men sometimes do wrong or doubt- 
ful things from an impulse, for which they cannot 
account, but from which they learn wisdom. The 
faults of Paul and Augustine made the mould in 
which their excellence was run ; and " Uriel," in the 
poem, well doubts if the old deities know not, though 
they tell it never to the younger, that naught is ill. 

Faith says that destiny is not doom. The jail, to 
which the convict goes, is no object of his faith. He 
bows to the verdict, feels the sheriff's hand on his 
collar, surveys the machinery of the law in jury and 
judge, hopes for no reprieve ; yet his faith stops in 
no visible circumstance, but foreruns beyond calamity 
to rescue at last. It is no demonstration nor conclusion 
in the head, as when the degrees are measured in a 
triangle or contents of a geometrical figure ; but it is 
the rejecting of all dimensions in our lot. The sailor's 
endless rojDC, the mechanic's revolving wheel or uni- 
versal joint, the spiral stair lifting at every turn, is its 
type. It is the Tower of Babel that does reach heaven. 

15 



226 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

It is the horoscope of paradise ; and, as the astron- 
omer's glass can compass no bound of sparkling con- 
stellations and conjunctions, so it overleaps every wall 
of time or space. 

It is not in propositions, but persons, — powers alive, 
whose relations are truth, designs goodness, and enter- 
prises joy, — to lay some ocean-cable, to reach a North 
Pole, or knock at the gates of shining mansions. 
People talk of faith in the Bible. It is impossible. 
You may blindly believe all its books an inspired 
summary ; but no scripture can be the object, nor more 
than the excitant of faith, as the quick-silvered cushion 
or revolving cylinder is of electricity. In a loose use 
of the word, I may have faith in material substances 
or in ideas and laws ; but strictly only in persons, in 
being and life. There may be acceptance of, but no 
faith in miracle, — only in an Ordainer whose mode is 
order ; a self-consistent One, who turns not to contradict 
himself, and cannot be outgeneralled by an alien force. 
Faith is faithfulness, or living by an inward law. 
David calls God's word a light to his feet. But no 
parchment or paper ever held that word which comes 
in visions, goes running swift to the ends of the world, 
and is published only in deeds. The Greeks had hill- 
top signals of flame, and the old racers handed the 
torch to each other. But there is a candle God must 
light in the soul. He goes round his own city, and 
has the only key to the hall. None else can apply the 
match and kindle the jet. Opposite rules may be 
gathered from between the sacred lids ; formulas are 
swallowed, and nice customs courtesy to great kings. 
Louis Napoleon bent, and dodged the shot. But there 



FAITH. 



227 



is a Marksman no respecter of persons, and careless 
if monarch or peasant come in his range. There is 
a bridge whoever passes pays toll, a tax impartially 
levied, a custom-house remitting the duty for no bribe, 
a road with no free passes, and a concert where no 
dead-head hears the song. The mercy is not that the 
law swerves, but that it does not slay. The storm 
rises in the teeth of the wind, with thunders to wreck 
the world. How the wheels rattle, and the steaming 
vapor rolls round the sparkling heat ! But the crash 
goes by. Up the valley for miles the sun turns the 
rain to silver drops. Rainbow on rainbow hangs 
double assurance on the flying cloud. The green 
gloom hurries seaward, and white sails scud home 
faster for the gale. In an hour all is clear and sweet 
in the sanctified sky. Is it law, or is it grace ? 

All the faiths have one root, like all the mountains, 
shooting from one bulb. God judge betwixt me and 
thee ends dispute. Inquisition or victim appeals to 
the same court. Father Taylor, seeing a half-dozen 
white martin-boxes of churches in a country town, said, 
" You have war here ! " But, like hunters or explorers 
scattering their forces to find the same game or gold, 
every sect adores one Spirit, whether by Quaker 
dumbness, Methodist shouting, or Romish cross. One 
painter uses high colors for his landscape, and another 
low. Is the first Episcopal, and the second Rational? 
Both are true. My neighbor's Orthodoxy is a piquant 
relish in his society. Dr. Bushnell can swallow creeds 
as Mirabeau did formulas, seeing the centre of the 
target they all hit. Elihu Burritt or Mary Lowell 
Putnam can translate languages at once into each 



228 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Other. No word suffices for the thought ; so we use 
many, as a surveyor his triangular series for a meas- 
ure. When love repeated and overworked sounds 
sentimental, we say truth; and Allah is refreshing 
when God has become trite. 

Our faith is better than we. We pretend surprise 
at the gyrations and self-inflictions of fakir and dervish, 
and barbarities of bull-fights, still the sport of Spain. 
But we murder Indians, and drink blood, like the base 
woman in Scripture wiping her lips and saying, 
"What have I done?" No speech of Owyhee or 
Japan is more brutal than the last report of slaughter 
from the commander of our troops, whose abolition 
of humanity no savage ever matched. But American 
religion takes it as bread and wine from the com- 
munion-board. The air is full of spirits, buzzing like 
so many bees in our bonnet ; but none help us to be 
merciful or just. The Church says to the world. Stand 
apart, I am holier than thou^ yet brings forth no bet- 
ter fruit. " That is a Magdalen^^ said a visitor, 
pointing to a picture on the wall. " No : a St. Cecilia," 
was the host's reply. " Well," rejoined the guest, " at 
this distance, my eyes are so poor I can scarce tell 
sinner from saint." We ask dreadful questions. Are 
communicants nobler than those who partake not of 
the elements? Are members of good society more 
generous than Bohemians? Are preachers less jeal- 
ous than artists or actors? I suspect a reputation for 
sanctity, under which men do unsaintly things. What 
is uncleanness but conscious cleanness, or a sense of 
dirt that cannot bear a mote, and insanely spends 
life in removing every speck ? But innocent childhood 



FAITH. 



229 



plays in the mud. Only the invalid is annoyed by 
foul weather. Hazlitt says the Italian lazzaroni let 
the fleas, that craze nice ladies, creep unmolested over 
their naked limbs. Unworthy men most warmly 
resent offences, swear at whoever imitates their mis- 
takes, and confronts them with a copy of their own 
sins. " To the pure all things are pure ; " but nothing 
to such as have " their own mind and conscience de- 
filed." Am I elect, my seat secured at the table or 
among the dignitaries on the platform ? In that per- 
suasion I am lost. Do we lift our eves to God? He 
is as low under our feet as high above our head. 
After mounting over the Swiss passes, Spliigen, Stel- 
vio, and Great St. Bernard, I came to the Finster- 
miinz, a tremendous gulf grander than the lofty pitch. 
The divine glory is in his condescension. His humility 
is sublimer than his exaltation above the clouds. Our 
conceptions affect our conduct. Some creeds demor- 
alize. But the idolater goes into the kingdom before 
the money-maker ; and his wit was not far, who, 
being shown two portraits of thievish stock-operators, 
w^ondered that of Jesus was not hung between ! 
Consistency would require too many crucifixions. We 
are hurt by our conceit of progress ; and suck a subtle 
poison from our songs of deliverance, 

"Which kings and prophets waited for, 
And sought, but never found." 

Are we so well, and were our predecessors so badly 
off\^ So the Orthodox chants, and the Liberal follows 
suit. But there was light and color in the world be- 
fore we were born. Mists rose to be clothed in beauty. 



230 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Gently fell the twilight and dew. There was joy in 
life and hope in death, or content to cease and give 
place. In the Christian era came Hamlet's question, 
" To be, or not to be." I have heard Christian men 
and women say they have no complaint of annihi- 
lation, if that be for the universe best ; as the Indian 
folded his arms, sang his death-song, and went over 
Niagara in his canoe. 

Be it what it may, that is not sad which we can 
sing about. Something delicious is there in a funeral 
hymn or dirge, with trumpet and muffled drum, of 
the dead march over the soldier's grave. A friend 
told me of the sweetness of the dying chime of bells, 
in a foreign town, as a figure of his fading life. Does 
not this feeling mix in the cadence of every bell that 
tolls? The child said it tired her to think of living for 
ever. The Oriental Nirwana is understood in the Oc- 
cident. But being equal to cessation is the strongest 
proof of continuance. The creature has title to live, 
that can surrender its life. Can a fly do it? Said a 
hearer of my sermon : " men are not worth saving." 
But the doctrine of depravity is proof of nobility. Who 
found it out? No goat or wolf, serpent or tiger, is 
ashamed of itself, or ever saw the plague of its own 
heart. The man that first discovered his sin went fur- 
ther than Columbus. Nothing but virtue could ever be- 
come aware of vice. Does not good taste detect discord 
in music, deformity in a posture, or disproportion in a 
building? How else is ugliness discerned in the charac- 
ter? Chief of sinners are you? To decide that, you 
must be expert professor of morals. That forth-putting 
woman does not move us like the gentle-voiced one 



FAITH. 231 

by her side, unanxious to lead. Set up your ideal 
standard, see yourself overhung as with the constella- 
tion Libra by the higher law, hold yourself amenable 
to a perfect tribunal, and worthy of hell-fire ; and then 
declare yourself worthless and corrupt utterly? This 
self-depreciation is native grandeur, the foil of goodness 
and bond of honor. Self-condemnation is God's abso- 
lution ; and pleading guilty, acquittal at his bar. 

Presumption of our own righteousness is a pest. 
Who has not seen in the house some king or queen 
who can do no wrong, and will take no counsel ; is 
omniscient to decide every point, with brazen impu- 
dence bluffs off objection, lies every day with pretence 
of information, and ends in that chronic wilfulness, or 
insanity of the will, for which no asylum is provided, 
yet mortal cannot endure, and gets rid of by a divorce 
or putting the globe between ? This head-strong self- 
confident temper check on its first appearance in your 
child. Tell me not, O fond parent, you would not 
break its will ! In wilfulness the will is not preserved, 
but destroyed. 

Faith is a moral quality, whose antithesis is disloyal- 
ty. Hypocrisy is the shell after the kernel is eaten out 
Something more than intellect must keep the faith. 
Unfaithfulness is worse than death, and opens a deeper 
sepulchre than can be dug in the ground. The deceit- 
ful companion is farther off than any stranger. As a 
man leaves a temple, you feel the traitor going out of 
the inner sanctuary. Though all seem fair on the 
surface between you, and you laugh and play with 
him still, he cannot without repentance return. All 
religious faith has the same spiritual property to 



232 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

resolve bulk of theology and body of divinity into 
simple persuasion that our Author will be true. Amid 
the glory of Nature, no sentence, of others or my own, 
will express my conviction. Before the stress of my 
trial no rampart of sect will stand. My metaphysics 
dissolve like fog burnt off by the sun. My citadel 
goes as a Minot's Ledge light-house under the storm. 
But I see the arm of God by day, and I feel it in the 
gloom. 

We make out a case for Christianity by calling 
Nature unmerciful. But what, if not pity, mean 
these warnings, — before earthquakes, eruptions, or 
billows hastening to cut off the beach, and mutterings 
of the tempest prior to the bolt.? " Breakers ahead " 
is the cry of alarm. But how curiously the peril is 
announced to the eye by the whitening wave, and in 
the night to the ear by the peculiar sound, — the rattle 
of the i-^i^-serpent answering to that of the land ! 
Mercy is no after-thought of a Being who has to 
make up his mind, but the constitution of matter and 
human nature. A man carries a few wild roses to a 
sick woman's room. Long years after, sick in his 
turn, he finds the flowers out of their ashes blooming 
in her memory, as she returns his service a hundred- 
fold. Nothing so natural as the supernatural help 
that makes all duty or calamity light. Is your task or 
lesson, act or speech, easy? Watch the kind of ease ! 
There is the facility of garrulity, and that of the Holy 
Ghost. Faith sees blessing prevail over bane, man's 
wrath a note of praise, evil a servant of good, and the 
assassin's dagger in God's hand, to save a nation when 
a martyr is made of its Chief. His providence no 



FAITH. 



233 



belief can sum. I take an Inventory of my religious 
effects. They are not a cent on a dollar of my debt. 
I cannot pay, and must break. What an assumption, 
that you can put the account on a page of rhetoric, in 
a syllogism of your logic, and balance the books with 
God! 

Faith is not a constant quantity, but an unvarying 
quality. There are no gulfs between men. As the 
slate and granite and trap-rocks all come to the surface, 
so the antiquary can forego his search, find all opin- 
ions present, and have a section of the world in every 
age. Comparative Theology has not exhausted its 
illustrations. The Chinaman's sending his body 
across the Pacific for burial repeats Egyptian em- 
balmment and the superstition of all nations about the 
grave. Brigham Young, as naturalist and house- 
holder, is our King Solomon ; the medium, a relation 
of the witch of Endor. The tripod becomes an exten- 
sion-table, with raps instead of voices ; the sibyl's cave, 
a wainscot at twilight. Mr. Home can show us in 
himself the bodily ascension of Jesus and Elijah. 
John was mistaken for the Messiah whose shoe-latchet 
he was not worthy to unloose, and Christ for Eli as or 
some old prophet come again. The grandfather re- 
appears in that blue-eyed babe of two black-eyed 
parents. In short human nature is one, despite all 
variations. He is a Hottentot, we say of some stupid 
groveller ; he is a Turk, of some cruel husband. The 
Esquimaux, drinking train-oil, feeds no more grossly 
than the man in broadcloth. Seeing his brother's 
unhappy self-exhibition, a great man said, " There is 
something in him like me." " His blood is like 



234 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

dum!" cried a French peasant at the execution of 
Louis XVI. " Yes," said Fox the English preacher ; 
" and therefore it should not have been shed." Goethe 
declared there was no sin he could not have committed, 
and John Wesley saw himself in the thief. / am a 
man^ and nothing huTnan from m,e alien^ brought 
down the house, on the Roman stage. There is a 
parallelism in the proverbs of all nations. We have 
a hook for every eye of old speculation, and can button 
our creed with one fifty centuries ago. 

Action or opinion has its ancient counterpart. 
Sheridan has the dash of Hannibal, Grant the pru- 
dence of Scipio, and Sherman does in Georgia what 
Xenophon did in Persia. Stone tools and weapons 
from antique caverns show the same art with our 
shops, railways, and mills. The exigencies of Cali- 
fornia mining have reinvented ancient tools. Our 
iniquities are as inveterate as our merits. We marvel 
at the Jew's contempt for the Gentile who was wiser, 
the Greek who was more polished, and the Samaritan 
who was more gracious than himself. But our Chinese 
prejudice is thicker than the famous wall. Are not 
heathen and fagan terms we apply to better men 
than ourselves ? When the Presbyterian priest would 
force his way into Calhoun's dying-chamber, " Fool ! " 
cried the statesman, " to think he can teach me things 
I have considered all my life ! " We fancy the prob- 
lems are solved. But every question is open. We 
float with our Fathers on the same sea of wonder, and 
sail out of and into the same horizon of shade. We 
cry for the same solace, — 

" And with no language but a cry." 



FAITH. 235 

What a benighted man, to talk of pre-existence, do 
they hold Plato, who have learned the precise fact of 
man's creation from the dust ! But Orthodoxy in our 
day repeats the doctrine. Dr. Beecher thinks it were 
mean for God to create us with a blot, like the blood- 
. stain no water can wash from the floor, or a piece of 
damaged goods. So we must have sinned in a prior 
state ; and our punishment is in the depravity with 
which we were born. Jesus pre-existed, we say. 
Why not everybody, if he was a man? He abolished 
death. But God chooses no favorites. We die like 
those before us. There is no unmixed truth in sacred 
history, nor unmixed error in profane. On a column, 
in a carriage, cupola, or balloon, I am upheld by the 
same earth ; and in all my metaphysics or common 
sense I have one Uplifter. Isaac Watts sings of the 
" basis " that belong as much to Paine or Voltaire. 
Men try to be sharp and get the best bargain. But 
I stand in awe before the justice none can escape. 
You can take no advantage of God. You will have 
no joy beyond your measure ; and I have not suffered 
too much. His car rolls on a law harder than steel, 
resisting every hammer or file. To the mind's eye 
matter disappears. Order and motion alone remain 
for his vehicle and will. 

Sects are as ships, whose common is the ocean, but 
each with its own mooring in port. The thinker sails 
where he will. The Free-Thinker encounters the 
Creed-Bound on the high seas of literature, politics, 
art, and general conversation : only they run in when 
clouds rise, to cast anchor in dogma ; and he, like a 
Red Rover, holds on his course. But both are one in 



236 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Faith, which starts with Spirit. Unbelief dates from 
the dust, and has only that mechanical notion of Infin- 
ity which it shares with the brute, who also sometimes 
seems in the creation to feel overpowered. But it is 
only a Finite extended. Nothing is infinite but the 
soul. Space is but one of the fields it works in. Our 
intellect is classified by what it begins with. " Hath 
the rain a father, and who hath begotten the drops of 
dew?" asks Job. It makes a difference if I consider 
that the rain is my father and the dew my mother, — 
that my generation is in the particles, not in my being 
thought of before I came, and coming because of me 
there could be a thought. There is but one question ; 
and the battle is drawn. All who hold the elements 
for their origin are on one side, and those who derive 
from the Elemental Power on the other. Even the 
animals, in their worship of man, have an obscure feel- 
ing of a source above the clay. " Be patient," I said 
to the dog who offered me his fore foot to shake : 
" your paw shall become a hand by and by." We 
speak of the body we are members of. A man's cul- 
ture is measured by the largeness of the community 
he consciously belongs to. Friends and relations, 
our social class', the municipality, the commonwealth, 
the country, the Pilgrim stock, the Anglo-Saxon, the 
human race, and all intelligence from the seraph to 
the beast, are so many ascending marks on the scale 
of dignity. Never was a nobler name than " Com- 
mune" but for want of the cofninune vinculum. If 
justice be the bond, the cause is international. If 
division of property, irrespective of industry, worth, 
and ability, be the aim, it means universal robbery and 



FAITH. 237 

poverty. It is arithmetical or geometrical progres- 
sion of all the pirates that ever beset the land or 
roamed the sea. 

Faith is not a conclusion, but a quest. It is confi- 
dence in a right we can reach, which growls more 
fine and tempts us on for ever. Mr. Martineau's 
title, " Endeavors after a Christian Life," was ridiculed 
as implying what he had not attained. But who has 
attained? Attainment were a block in the path, a 
blind alley, the great stone rolled against the door of 
the sepulchre. If Jesus be not more and better than 
he was on earth, then he is dead, and never rose. I 
never meet a man but to inquire my way. I am 
thankful not only for the Inner Light, but for the road 
which generations have made and trod. We com- 
plain of every stone and turn in the winding and un- 
even way over which we walk or drive. But do we 
think how much digging and blasting it cost? Only 
to its termination in any forerunner's steps let us 
object. Even the great Example is not the finality, 
possibility, and flying horizon of the human mind. 
For creatures who are in a new coil of the chain of 
habit every year, what a dignity death adds to life, as 
a winding-up of involved accounts, and setting us up 
in this business of character again ! The Church is but 
provisional, and must not complain of those who find 
no communion in the cold passing round of the loaf 
and cup, but are driven to the oracle within. " Is it 
wicked," said one, " to play croquet on Sunday, and 
not go to church?" "Yes," was the answer, "if it 
be a wicked thought." But pious scandal of your 
neighbors is worse. 



238 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Depravity may be unconscious ; but sin is the sense 
of sin, and faith is the feeling of spirit. Great is our 
debt to the explorations of matter that distinguish the 
age. But the results only point to a higher method we 
must reach. The microscope throws the glory of the 
telescope into the shade, by its revelations of that vital 
structure which concerns us more than all the splendor 
of the sky. " This star with a tail spinneth round 
that other : let it spin," we say with the Turkish cadi. 
But if the secrets of health and disease can be dis- 
closed by the physiologist, he more than Herschel 
or Leverrier shall have our thanks. Yet mind and 
conscience elude the keenest lens. God or man will 
never be seen through a glass, even darkly. The 
protoplasm, which Mr. Huxley describes as the phys- 
ical basis of life, is composed of several principles, 
behind which the mystery of being is intrenched ; and 
when you shall have got the tiles of all fashions used 
in this castle of creation, the Power that lays them in 
order is still to seek, whom no magnifier will ever 
detect among the atoms or the orbs. But what we 
cannot grub up out of the dirt, or overtake on the 
comet's trail, our natui'e shares. God, says the phys- 
icist, is unknown and unknowable. But to the spirit 
nothing is known so well, in that self-knowledge of 
God and man, knowing each himself in the other, 
which is the foundation of all knowledge. What is 
knowledge? An impression on the senses, picture in 
the eye, or sound in the ear? I know the ship when 
I have numbered its sails, and shrouds, and masts. 
I can call it sloop or schooner, frigate or brig. I 
know the bird or fish or plant, when I have analyzed 



FAITH. 



239 



its organism, and assigned its class. But I do not 
know the Deity, at whose least whisper of duty in my 
breast I am eager to work, ready to suffer and die ! 
The youth and beauty of our Israel, that fell in high 
places or low ones of battle, knew not why ! I deny 
the materialist's definition. As to your '^ knowledge,'* 
said the cadi to Layard, " I defile it." Limiting the 
term to an understanding of external objects put in 
rows deserves the contempt of all to whom the unseen 
is real, and ideas are entities which cast as shadows 
the sun and moon. Nature is no dualism. Yet the 
words spirit and matter must be used. The only 
question is, Who heeds the laws of language best.? Sci- 
ence, the foe of Superstition and destroyer of ground- 
less beliefs, is friend of Faith, and relays its foundation 
beneath frost or flood. It is teaching that force is not 
quantity, that there is no such thing as size, but every 
thing according to our optical apparatus — giant or 
dwarf — and the resistless energies too subtile for sight 
or touch. All is the same Proteus in manifold modes. 
Every entry that is opened, shaft sunk, tunnel bored, 
organic or inorganic latch lifted, leads to one point, 
which is centre and circumference alike, — a Unity we 
have as yet no better name for than God, but whose 
suggestion is not from time or nature, but the soul. 
O student of these fair appearances, observer of this 
ghost of God we call the world ! before you close the 
catalogue, account for yourself. Will you tell us why 
you are here .? Who woke your curiosity, and started 
you on your track ? Was there no Instigator of your 
researches, or Source of your delight? What is the 
name of That which persuades you not chaos, but 
cosmos, is all .'* 



240 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

In Paul's trinity of graces, love is greatest. But 
the love that fondles is not so good as the faith which 
forgives and expects, and abolishes antipathy. The 
feeling to a fellow-creature which makes him dear, 
though he will not further or vote for you, nor come to 
hear you lecture or preach, is worth more than all 
the superficial amiableness ever poured out. This 
confidence is the essence, the great wheel on which 
all lesser ones turn, the kingdom to which all else is 
added, the condition on which our actions will take 
care of themselves. " What are you doing ? " it was said 
to a noble young person. " As usual, nothing," she 
replied. But it was enough such sweetness of spirit, 
purity of look, and beauty of manners should exist. 
There would be no wrong or waste activity, and no 
pride of accomplishment, as in the busybody that 
meddles with other people's matters, and clothes him- 
self in his own righteousness. Who needs your haste 
and sweat, and superserviceable interference? 

The creed touches the character. In the rebellion 
against Rome of Protestantism, in the recoil from 
Orthodoxy of Liberality, and the large field we have 
won of unfettered judgment, our dogmatism has begot 
indifferentism. We say. No matter what a man thinks, 
if he lives right. Liberty has become, instead of a 
means, the end. One being asked which he pre- 
ferred, faith in God or freedom, answered. My free- 
dom. But when free love, free trade, free rum, and free 
religion are the mottoes, we ask what curb will keep 
this wild horse of freedom from running away with 
us. You look to your harness when you are going to 
take a ride. Keep a tight rein on this span of free- 



FAITH. 



241 



inquiry and free-will, to hold them to the King's high- 
way. Without conviction, liberty, like a ship carrying 
too much sail, ploughs under. What is the use of your 
independence? W^hat is the freedom of the seas for.? 
To sail about aimless and shoot into every inlet for 
sport ; or like that Alabama^ burnt and branded for 
ever into English history, to make free with other 
folk? Freedom is a bastard unless its parent be Truth. 
No matter what our opinions are ! Is it any matter 
what a man eats, but not what he puts into the stomach 
of his mind, a French novel or a psalm ? Many ways 
to heaven? Some to hell! Stop, as did the young 
man in the low theatre when he read in capitals over 
the door, To the Pitt Are you going to the rehearsal? 
There is a rehearsal for every thought, ere the act, be 
it music of charity, or murder in the Bussey Woods, 
or on the Brookline road. What but Sabbatarian 
superstition stretches into intolerance the tether of the 
law, to shut up a public library from those who have 
no church? What but bigotry made one ask, " Shall 
we have only Unitarians and infidels on the platform 
to celebrate Italian emancipation?" Yet a certain 
minister proclaims his adherence to the same old 
articles held forth a hundred years ago, saying he 
would nail them on his church-door for a sign. So 
indeed it were well to do! The farmer nails mis- 
chievous birds and beasts of prey, hawk and fox, on 
his barn-door. The trader nails base coin to the 
counter. I saw counterfeit money hung up, a long 
row of bills, in a city warehouse. Luther nailed his 
propositions, a placard against the papal bulls, on 
the German cathedrals. Such doctrines as total 

i6 



242 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

depravity and particular election abolish the Decla- 
ration of Independence, and deserve any exposure of 
shame. Were the Five Points in New York named 
with any reference to the Five Points of Calvin ? They 
lead to the same despair ! We were shocked by Taney's 
opinion that the negroes in this country have no rights 
white men are bound to respect. But the abolitionists 
might have spared him the length of their lash. This 
belief was founded not only on his construction of the 
Constitution, but his notion of slavery as a heaven- 
ordained institution based on plenary inspiration of 
the text. Why should not we curse Canaan if God 
did? What was the judicial decision but part of the 
theological one, that mankind have no rights He is 
bound to respect? Was the Divine proceeding in 
dooming men for moral inability the pattern for us to 
match, like reverent copyists in galleries of the works 
of the great masters, or tapestry-sewers in the French 
shops? This the lost image we were made in to stencil 
in our demeanor and stitch into our heart? Has the 
child in the cradle no claims on you ? More indefea- 
sible ones have we all on God. I ask him to justify 
my existence ; nor will he that resented not Job's 
expostulation condemn my demand, but satisfy me 
my creation was wisdom, and his bestowment of life 
a boon. Though my fate, like an engulfing billow 
racing after the vessel, were hard at my heels, one 
thing is needful : his conduct must be such as while 
I live I can imitate without harm. Is he unforgiving, 
remitting only with blood? I shall be the same. 
Did he punish Jesus in our stead? Let us hunt up 
scapegoats, and in every court let the guilty go ! For 



FAITH. 243 

our salvation must Christ's body and blood be par- 
taken in the elements, though the taste of wine wake 
in the once delivered drinker the wolf of appetite? Is 
the Pope infallible? Then a kingdom must lie in 
chains, at least till the world learn to laugh at a pon- 
tiff no more able than the astrologer in the story to 
predict his own fate, and his authority be blown to 
pieces by a new-born nation's breath. 

From men's persuasion comes their course. Whence 
cruelty to animals, but from an opinion derived from 
the Hebrew books, and customs too, that we are their 
absolute lords? Trace a human quality in beasts, 
make them our relations, and our new estimate will 
stand them in better stead than a thousand Bergh- 
societies. Truth is moral. " Is aught wrong in the 
temper of my articles?" asked a bold editor, knowing, 
with Goethe, that the spirit we act in is the highest 
matter. " No," was the answer : " your sharpness is 
not for yourself, but your cause." All the weapons of 
God's armory we are to wield against false prophets. 
Wrath and ridicule do not belong to selfish men 
to use, but to enthusiasts for the truth. Let them 
buckle on the steel against His adversaries, and draw 
the sword, and poise the lance of holy indignation and 
scorn. Would you bless your fellow, do not so much 
give him creature-comforts, but enlarge his view. 
Any belief, like that in immortality, is sound that 
promotes the common weal. God made us not for 
handiwork alone, but to behold his beauty. 

If perfect love casteth out fear, perfect faith casteth 
out sorrow. Do we weep when mature fruit is gathered ? 
Does the husbandman mourn over his sheaves ? What 



244 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

means your stubborn grief but that there is no garner 
for the soul ? Is it not only the shock of corn, fully 
ripe in its season, that is gathered, but the flowers and 
the buds ? Yet we pluck them from the garden and 
the field ; and the human blossoms, like those that had 
unfolded in a coffin on its way, fulfil their promise out 
of our sight. 



X. 

LAW. 

USE different words as we may for diverse aspects 
of the creation or moods of mind, there is no 
distinction between law and person, or law and love. 
By law we mean the Divine method or habit, not an 
alien power to constrain. If our growing knowledge 
convince us that there is no departure from the line, 
we do not believe that line is arbitrary, or was ever 
laid down by One who would fain leave it if he could ; 
but is itself expression of his own essence. Truth, 
beauty, goodness, — these three in the language of the 
schools are one and consubstantial. 

We are placed in the world amid forces we cannot 
measure, of Nature without and our own nature with- 
in ; liable to be run away with by the elements and our 
own passions. The reins, which are knowledge and 
will, are put in our hands ; yet we shall be unseated 
and ridden over unless we take heed : and the danger 
is twofold, — from other driving as our own. As an 
old author says, we are like ships in a storm, in danger 
from the waves and each other. There is a super- 
stition that it promotes health to sleep with the head 
to the north, to correspond to the axis of the globe. 
To ride backward or look from a piazza on the sea 



246 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

makes some persons sick. Farmer or sailor knows 
he can make the elements friends or foes, — difference 
of pilot being the only reason one vessel comes to port 
and another founders in the same gale. " Man will 
be happy," said Spurzheim, " when he confines him- 
self to understand and find ways to execute his Cre- 
ator's laws." We are at school to them from our 
infancy. They are the only university. The child 
finds that his throat is the wrong place to put down 
the gravel he plays in, that the fire or candle does not 
agree with his fingers, that edge-tools w^ll cut hands 
taking them by the blade, and that he sits down very 
suddenly on the floor unless circumspect with the 
muscles upon which his leg-practice begins. Nature 
and our nature are like two mutually adjusted clocks 
or harps. 

This sense is in the proverbs and cries of all nations. 
" Be careful ! " says our companion when we step 
over the threshold, or on the stairs, or lift the baby, 
or open the knife, or reach for the razor, or cut with 
the scissors, or fasten the rope, or loose the main- 
sheet, or belay. " Look out ! " cries the Yankee 
coachman ; " Prenez-garde ! " the French omnibus- 
driver ; " Fire, fire ! " the rock-blaster. The steam- 
whistle screams far off to clear the track ; the red or 
white flag of the signal-man warns horse and man at 
the crossing ; the watchman springs his rattle at mid- 
night-disturbance ; the bell is rung by hand or by 
lightning in cities, in a conflagration. In Teneriffe 
I heard the Spanish sentinel cry every hour in the 
night, " All is serene ! " as if the citizens must be 
wakened every little while to be assured they might 



LAW. 247 

sleep soundly. " Get out of the way ! " we shout to 
our dearest friends. The chariot of law will bear us 
if we sit in it ; its wheels worse than any Juggernaut 
will grind us if we be in the opposition to His Majes- 
ty's government. It is not the train that I see arrive 
or start, but His statute of which that is the apparition. 
A hundred locomotives go through the tunnel every 
day ; but with every gesture and breath His decrees 
pass. Do you think retribution is postponed till the 
world is burnt up, and the trumpet sounds and the 
general judgment dawns, and all nations assemble at 
a final bar ; and, if these things do not take place, you 
will escape, run toll, and go scot free? Your punish- 
ment is at once. An impure or intemperate man 
wrestles with a law, and is surer to be thrown than if 
he assailed the engine. The people say ironically to 
a man who has blundered against a wall or run his 
craft on a ledge, " Did you hurt that rock any? " More 
than by any disobedience you can the Divine com- 
mand ! The prudent profligate, who thinks not to in- 
jure his body, and is said only to corrupt innocence in 
the partner of his guilt, is dying out in the centre, like 
the rotten cocoa-nut, whose husk only hides its ill odor. 
The preachers say, " Break not the heavenly laws ! " 
But a law was never broken. The law breaks us, if 
we try which of the two is best. We fight a duel with 
God. Jacob wrestles with the Most High, and finds 
his own thigh out of joint. You think you are sharp 
when by some ingenious trick you make what you 
call a good bargain. You are stupid not to know it 
is bad. " I Calculate to do about right," we say. 
That about is often a large circumference, a good way 



248 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

off from the centre. It is no honor to hit the target 
on the rim. " Memorialize congress," it was said to a 
smuggler complaining of the confiscation of his bark : 
" they will do you justice." " Ah," he replied, " that 
is what I am afraid of ! " Whether congress will 
do justice, its treatment of French and other claims 
makes us doubt. But there is a Legislator who will. 
No fraud or robbery, violated purity of a woman or 
stained honor of a man, outrage that makes us ask if 
any God live and reign, but he will atone to every 
victim and make the unholy victor quake. 

We speak of those who are responsible^ being in 
power. In some power the weakest of us are. We 
call it the will of God when our disrespect of his order 
turns its blessing to a curse, as the Turkish captain 
condones the mismanagement that casts away his ship, 
with pious ascription to fate. "Just my luck ! " you 
say. No, your fault ! " His providence ! " No, your 
^^providence ! Piety to accept the miseries which 
impiety inflicts? Not so, if impiety consists not alone 
in profane swearing, but in disregard of conditions the 
Being you worship ordained. It is time to cease from 
our false baptism of the calamities, we draw on our 
own heads, as his appointments, and the unchristian 
christening of our mistakes as his inscrutable wisdom ; 
as if he struck us when we wounded ourselves, or 
slew us when we committed suicide ; as if the typhoid 
fever, as his angel, came out of the well that com- 
municates with the receipt of ordure. If death be his 
messenger, we often despatch it. If he make out its 
warrant, he leaves it, as Horace Mann said, to every 
V one of us to insert the date. It is no absolute will. 



LAW. 249 

You determine it for yourself, and by your conduct for 
your husband, wife, child, or parent, — lengthening out 
their days with gracious manners, or with insult stab- 
bing the heart to bleed life prematurely away, and 
bringing down gray hairs with sorrow to the grave. 
Father it upon God, will you ? 

I accuse not Deity of these horrors and ghastly facts 
in human life. Human carelessness is the misdoer 
and homicide. It kills a thousand to one beyond every 
assassin and highwayman, robber on the land or 
pirate on the sea. In neglect of sanitary rules at the 
table and in the relation of the sexes, in private un- 
sanctity of the young, in unfit or defective exercise of 
body and mind, in all its undermining or overloading, 
its detraction from human vitality outrivals the waste 
of war, all whose flaming standards measure out for 
mankind the fields of conflict, but not the wider reaches 
of their fault. Who shall weigh the woes inuring, like 
wrecks and heaps of sea-weed cast upon the shore, 
from inconsideration of the Truth ? 

When a powder-mill explodes, or a ferry-boat blows 
up, or a locomotive dragging one train crashes through 
another, it is published as an " awful accident" No 
accident, but human heedlessness ; not deliberate 
murder, but thoughtless manslaughter. The mixing 
of broken wood and iron, and splintered glass and 
suffocating steam, amid gasping men and women, is as 
regularl}'- according to law as the rising of the sun, 
or ebb and flow of the sea. Only it was attempting 
to proceed against law, instead of with it. The law 
goes on more terrible than an army with banners, and 
the fragments are left bleeding and burning behind. 



250 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

There are no accidents. Disorder is but the result of 
our Wind neglect of Order. Our defeat is in order 
then. The carpenters on the staging, who had not 
nailed the support, fell to the ground by the gravitation 
that steadies your seat. The equilibrium is disturbed? 
Not God's or Nature's, when we miss our footing, and 
are overset. " I did not know," you say. Of all par- 
ties the Know-nothings was the worst. 

But is there no mercy } Never, in the sense of 
releasing from this hug of Omnipotence withstood. 
Suppose the unwilful authors of the so indulgently 
denominated mishap could have been let off from the 
legitimate issue of their unlawful course, the attractions 
of matter cancelled, the hot vapor held back, and the 
coals of fire forbidden to kindle : we should not know 
what to depend upon. God and Nature would be 
playing fast and loose with us. All our calculations 
would be disturbed. We should be put completely 
out of our reckoning, and not be under tuition, but at 
a juggler's show. Education were impossible. When 
shall we learn that justice is not one thing, and pity 
another ; but Mercy and Truth meet together. Right- 
eousness and Peace kiss each other, and the Divine 
compassion no exceptional attitude, but the undeviat- 
ing step? 

We complain that the innocent suffer from the errors 
of the guilty. But we see not the Hand holding the 
balance of redress, death being the pivot, and one 
scale hanging with even weight on the immortal side, 
however tremulous the beam. Who shall say that to 
the blameless departed compensation is not made.^* 
There is no murmur in their song. They have no 



LAW. 25 1 

account of vengeance to make up. Earthly law mav 
exact recompense ; but no standing grudge beyond ! 
We tread on graves. Our road is ashes. The roll- 
ing stock, the running gear, glides swiftly over the 
spot of disaster which has left no trace. The travel- 
lers, who knew not it was a way-station for heaven 
where they stopped, on a higher plane proceed. 

There was one for whom it was not unmeet, like 
Elijah, to go in the chariot of fire. In the spiritual 
fabric he spent his last thread. He was like one turn- 
ing the wheel when the wool gives out on the spindle. 
The fibre of his frame worn out, it was meet he should 
be dismissed from the field for refreshment, and that 
music of welcome for those who have well done. One 
virtue, of patience, that went against the fire of his 
nature, and high pressure of his speed, is for him 
struck from the list. The hireling longs for the 
shadows that point to the great emancipation of the 
freedman's dawn, where the Lord will deal gently 
with him who has dealt severely with himself. For 
Ezra Stiles Gannett let there be on the dry page of 
discussion trace of a loving tear. 

But the whole sweep is beyond us. We can reckon 
the orbit of the most erratic body in the sky ; but 
Providence mocks our mathematics. Yet science is 
doing the work of religion in reducing phenomena 
under the range of law ; and no libel is so gross as 
to charge it with serving the cause of atheism, or 
unbelief, in disclosing the invariably regular march of 
all appearances and events. Is the living God to be 
proved only in arbitrary ordination and wilful favor to 
individuals or nations.? Must he be a Parent who 



252 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

has pets, a partial Schoolmaster whose generosity to 
one pupil is injustice to another, a King who smiles 
on his courtiers, and for critics of his authority has 
only frowns? Shall some exceptional act, some whim- 
sical decree, some miracle of love to a chosen man, in 
worse violation of order than any physical prodigy, 
demonstrate his presence? Thanks to investigators 
who say, No ! 

Still less is the cause of Faith served by ascribing 
any occurrence to a malignant power. Yet a new 
phrase, in startling capitals, has lately saluted our eyes 
on placards, and from the orator's speech, and in public 
prints, — Fire-Fiend^ — a natural expression to per- 
sonify as a demon the element of awful and sudden 
mischief, but involving a hurtful mistake. Fire-min- 
ister or fire- angel is the true religious word. The 
acceptance, with which the other name has been reit- 
erated shows how prevalent still the false feeling which 
invented it, — that God the Good has a rival pov^er of 
evil in the world, with agents of destruction in its em- 
ploy. But two forces are not ; only one in Nature, 
making servants of all substance. Nothing in the uni- 
verse so potent as fire. It has lately in a day laid in 
ashes a city which some thought the most beautiful in 
the States ; and, not content, swept villages in Michi- 
gan and Wisconsin away w;ith its burning broom, as it 
turned to ashes in an hour the cars on that fatal East- 
ern train, and poured out from the broken pipes the 
suffocating steam ; consumed to the water's edge the 
gay yacht on Long Island Sound ; and lurks ever}- 
where, read}^ to spring forth quicker than a panther 
or assassin for deadly mischief, unless sharper than 



LAW. 



253 



any creature in ambush it is watched ; indifferent 
whether it destroy treasure or life. When the dog- 
star rages, men fall like flies under the sun-stroke. Is 
it not diabolical? No; it is divine. Without it there 
were nothing human, no life extant of any sort. Un- 
seen Spirit we believe Author of all. But physical 
philosophy has shown the sun, the great body of 
light and heat for our system, to be the source of all 
vegetable and animal life, the Almighty's instrument 
in creation ; and the sun shines because it burns. 
Sixty or seventy tons of red-hot coal a day supplied 
the motive-power of the steamer that brought me 
across the sea. What amount of fuel is thrown into 
that furnace a hundred millions of miles away, to 
draw the planetary load ! There is no bounty of the 
harvest, and no beauty of the blossoms, no benefit of 
changing seasons, no clothing for our body, no daily 
bread, comfort, necessity, or luxury, but his chariot 
brings it. From his genial rays the growth of wood 
to build house and ship or kindle on our hearth ; or 
out of forests to lay away the mines of concentrated 
combustible to warm us in winter, and turn ten million 
wheels and spindles in our factories the year round. 
It is all fire, angel and minister of God, cashier 
of the bank that never fiils. • In the cordial pressure 
of your hand, beating of your heart, blush on your 
cheek, sparkle of your eye, animation of your look and 
gesture, is some portion of its beams. I do not wonder 
at the Oriental adoration of fire, the Persian worship 
of the sun ; and I admire the keen retort of the East- 
ern sage to the Englishman who rebuked his idolatry : 
" You, too, might worship the sun if in your foggy 



254 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

climate you ever saw him." Could any idol be 
allowed, it would be no block, picture, or graven 
image, but his blazing orb. Jets of flame, blue and 
crimson, which no science can comprehend nor logic 
expound, lead our thoughts into unfathomable mystery. 
Cold is death : the marvel of life arises with warmth. 

If fire be the strongest of the elements in its excess 
or misplacement to harm, it has no peculiar com- 
mission to injure nor monopoly to destroy. The water 
that buoys will drown. The air, soft as a zephyr, can 
rise in tempest of ruin. The earth, our floor, may 
cave in to bury us alive, or slide from the mountain 
and carry off* dwelling and inmate. Every thing will 
bless or ban us, as we put ourselves in fit or cross 
relations. On its right hand, it welcomes ; on the left, 
it sends us accursed away. It may be benediction 
or scourge, cornucopia or vial of wrath. According 
to our behavior, it frowns or smiles, furthers or blasts, 
gives us a reception or sets up a bar of judgment. 

We owe*a tender pity to the sufferings of our fellow- 
creatures. Never was a tenderer call for sympathy 
than comes from the city, beside the sepulchre of its 
matchless prosperity so speedily dug. Yet what was 
the conffagration but a dreadful calling to account of 
the hasty ambition for wealth and success that put 
such walls of pine and masses of shingle, and thin 
veneers of brick and stone, the best of which were 
only nominally fire-proof, and wide sections where 
if one building went a hundred must follow, at the 
mercy of a kerosene lamp kicked by a cow ? — as in 
Portland a fire-cracker was the equally insignificant 
occasion of doom. If we charge a ledge or load a 



LAW. 255 

cannon, and lay a train of powder, or attach a fuse, 
and then apply a spark, we know what to expect. 
We should understand with equal certainty what will 
come in such ill-constructed and unguarded quarters 
of many of our towns, when some flung-away match, 
or midnight reader's candle at the bed-curtain, or 
careless ash-heap, or smoker's pipe (getting every 
year to be a more general and unbearable nuisance), or 
burning gun-wad, times the flame, it starts in a corner, 
Vv^ith draught and wind to give it instant velocity and 
terrible voracity in its course. Chicago endures the 
penalty. But she is not alone, if even especially 
guilty. She is conscript for our battle with the 
avenger, choosing that point of attack and warning 
us with what other onslaught the war may go on. 
She is scapegoat of our sin, bearing it into the wilder- 
ness of her desolation, if we repent. She is one 
summoned for correction as an example. Avoid her 
funeral-pyre by seeing to the security of your own 
edifices and streets. 

Fire a fiend? What bore the tidings of calamity 
and the cry for help but that same fire in the shape of 
lightning over the wires, more rapid in its office than 
devouring flame? What sent back instantaneous 
promise of aid and certificate of value but the same 
stream, the essence of the element that had made the 
havoc? Fire is the most alarming of cries. It is a 
good servant, but a bad master. But let us not forget 
it is in its nature beneficent alone. A great cause of 
death, M. Coquerel tells us, in the siege of Paris was 
the cold, want of fuel in exceptionally severe weather ; 
and the lives of children were saved by a few sticks 



256 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

to make a fire to prepare and keep warm their food. 
If the vengeance of violated law^ comes through fire, . 
careering on the vs^irlwind's breath, beating dovs^n arch 
and column and marble front, and escaping all control, 
vs^e must not call malign the executor of justice and 
instructor to obedience. 

Men shrink from this idea of wide-spread woe as 
punishment. They prefer to call it a disaster, visita- 
tion of Providence. It is a sefitence^ as much as when 
a man is sent to the gallows or jail. God's officers 
are in waiting, his detective's touch on our shoulder. 
It is easy, you say, to be wise after the event. Well, 
next time let us be wise before the event ! In the 
enormous size our cities grow to, in the superficial 
quality of our carpentry and masonry, in the too late 
arrival of our engines at the spot, we may be less 
safe than in the times when we had but a bell with no 
electric arm to ring it, every man's buckets hung in his 
garret, and all good citizens rushed from their rooms 
to put out the first gleam of danger or restrict it to a 
narrow space. Wisdom after the event ! Have we 
yet to learn that petroleum oil will explode with a 
scintillation, that a huge flame will leap across a scant 
passage, and when it gets roaring headway will smite 
the stoutest bulwarks like a surging sea to bear down 
all before it? 

But in the anguish is saving grace. It reveals the 
interconnection and solidarity of mankind. Qiiarrel 
as they will, and vile specimens of human nature — 
roughs, thieves, murderers for booty, plunderers of the 
poor, selfish refusers of assistance save at exorbitant 
prices — as any seething of the social elements throws 



LAW. 



257 



like scum to the top, these fellow-creatures do not 
desert each other in time of need. Humanit}^ is not 
extinguished but excited by misfortune, though we 
share the shock. As the great Lisbon earthquake 
sent a ripple over the ocean to American shores, 
London and Liverpool capital feels the blow of falling 
Chicago. But London and Liverpool are not with- 
held from charity by their loss. Everywhere none 
more ready to give than those who have suffered, to 
those who have suffered more. It is a noble temper 
in this mortal clay, a shining refutation of the dogma 
that the soul is totally depraved. It is God himself, 
who is love, moving in his children's hearts. It is an 
Internationality, or super-nationality, all whose mem- 
bers rejoice or mourn together. 

It is curious to see how widely through the country and 
the world, from a single town, run manifold branches 
of this great system in modern business of insurance 
against fire* But the failure of insurance companies 
under the strain, and the disclosure of the fact that 
particular corporations will agree to cover thirty times 
their own capital or assets, may suggest a query how 
far we are covered, and whether commissioners, like 
some boiler-inspectors, are not too easy in their search. 

Fire, then, is Heaven's servant, and no fiend. The 
old Theology must answer in part for its being so 
misunderstood. The ungovernable fury of fire fairly 
unloosed ; its hideous waste of wide regions, leaving 
groves and fields and habitations blackened heaps ; its 
terrific overflow from volcanic peaks into streams of 
lava, to scorch and whelm in ruin vineyard and abode ; 
its dismal smotherings of man and beast ; the ground 

17 



U- 



25 8 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

trembling and rumbling with its pent-up force, im- 
patient to escape from the centre it constitutes of the 
globe, with famous judgments, as on Sodom and Go- 
morrah, — have doubtless furnished to writers of Scrip- 
ture the hint of the popular hell. It was an apprehen- 
sion from Nature, not inspiration of the Holy Ghost. 
How much more grand and true David's conception 
of it, as a minister bearing the Lord's gifts and correc- 
tions alike in its hand ! 

Fire a devil or factor of Beelzebub ? What is this 
warming of the heart, all over the land and the world, 
but an inward fire lighted from the supersolar spark, 
and having in it a million-fold the heat even of those 
fierce, unquenchable tongues that sucked up the verdure 
round the Lakes, licked into dust the metropolis of 
Illinois, and feasted on the blood of thousands of lives, 
to mark this hemisphere of the West with one of the 
chief astounding afflictions in the annals of mankind.'* 
Fire in the wrong place — on the floor, and not on the 
hearth ; in a powder-magazine, and not a factory-chim- 
ney ; in a defective flue instead of a poor man's hovel — 
is no comfort. The inward fire — in our hate, not our 
kindness ; in envy, not generosity ; in lust, not love — is 
no minister of grace. Yet even it has caught, to burn 
out the often foul chimney of a human breast, which 
will draw better when it is clean. The remorse we 
deprecate we could not spare. Fan the flame of a 
fine compunction. Let the fire, that has levelled a 
city to the soil out of which with such indomitable 
industry it was raised, be met with the brighter glow 
of charity. As in the prairie on whose edges she sat, 
their crown and lustre for a thousand miles, fire is 



LAW. 259 

fought with fire, so against the outward element let 
us set the interior flame of good-will. Because love 
was not burnt, Chicago shall be rebuilt. Charity shall 
be the master-mechanic. Courage shall be restored in 
her citizens by the world's generosity. She shall rise 
fi'om prostration, with the help of a hundred cities, 
more fair and strong than before ; and, with her hands 
stretched to the lakes and the sea, feed us again with 
meat and bread, if we feed her sore want and hunger 
now. 

If there is a law of Nature, there is a law of love 
in human nature and the Divine. When we talk of 
natural law, let us not forget that which is not less 
natural because it is spiritual. The overflow of sym- 
pathy in the shape of bounty surprises giver and 
receiver. Yet it is no accident nor choice, but a ne- 
cessity firmer than the ravage of flame or axis of the 
globe. What merit in that succor which is the consti- 
tution of the human heart? If we speak of the whole 
humanity, and not, like Paul, of a sin-distracted soul, 
the law of the members is the law of the mind. The 
flame that made a cinder of the great city, and used 
forests for its kindlings, was but the lamp that law is 
read by. If without such light the inward engraving 
might get effaced or obscured, the conflagration is a 
blessing. If the fire were sent not only to consume 
town and village, treasure and life, but to burn deeper 
this lesson, its art is glorious beyond all other encaustic 
pictures. 

The Divine law is remedy, not fatal disease. The 
Samaritan that will not leave the robbed and wounded 
traveller to perish is not a man sitting on his beast and 



L 



26o RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

riding between Jerusalem and Jericho, but mankind 
as a comforter for every afflicted man. We heal our 
own flesh when we pour balm into anybody's wounds. 
The apostle's figure is true : Christian goodness is 
kindness to one's self; and the Western paper's sen- 
tence was scarce a conceit or hyperbole, — that even 
Chicago is essential to the world. 

Our help to the needy is a meter of civilization and 
religion. It gauges our discovery of the Personality 
in which we all meet together. No individuality but 
must pass and melt in the consciousness of an equal 
destiny and source. But this is no mechanism. The 
ocean will not flow where is no inlet ; and there are 
souls closed up against this benevolent tide. They 
are shut out just as much from their own joy. Virgil's 
line, — 

" Happy if they but knew their own welfare," 

illustrates the deeper self-ignorance of those who can- 
not learn pity when in such blazing letters. But they 
are becoming the exceptions. How fellow-feeling in- 
creases and benefactors multiply ! All the prophecies 
that illuminate the Bible grow pale before the fact of 
the millennial day. It is easy for a hard heart to dis- 
pense alms to a wretched object. But to lavish 
supplies to beneficiaries hid by the breadth of the 
earth is a revelation of the sons of God. After the 
death of Thomas Starr King, a man in California, 
leaning on his tool, and with tears running down his 
cheeks, cried out, "Howl loved that man!" "You 
knew him, I suppose? " said the traveller to whom he 
spoke. " No, I did not." " You have heard him 



LAW. 261 

speak, then?" was the rejoinder. "No: I never 
saw him," said the rude miner again. When affection 
like that shall spread as a common sentiment, the 
misers will be in the minority, the kinship from one 
touch of nature will be owned ; perhaps the Divine 
need will cease of startling us by flagrant cases to 
commiserate, and society be born again. 



XL 

ORIGIN. 

ALL thinkers consent that the Bible book of Gen- 
esis gives but a fable of the creation, or the 
conception of some poetic mind, not any miraculous 
knowledge which the Creator bestowed. That the 
light and the heavenly bodies and every living order 
arose from some distinct, instantaneous fiat, science 
cannot admit ; nor that there was ever such a nothing 
as the catechism supposes out of which the universe 
came. We can as easily conceive that God was born 
as th'at the world began. It was not made in time, but 
by the Eternal Builder, in whose productive essence 
it is everlasting as himself; nor can we insert any 
notion of age or chronology, between his being and 
his work, however we may trace connection in its 
parts, or the progress of a single planet like the earth. 
Physical philosophy, in attempting to show a com- 
mencement, commits the same error with literal faith ; 
and is guilty of a blunder all its own, in deriving every 
thing from matter instead of spirit, as is so grandly 
asserted in the Scripture text. Reason allows not 
dust as the basis, but the deposit of mind. Only a 
thoughtless observation could bring forth the fancy, 



ORIGIN. 263 

that figures in so many a verse, of " primeval chaos 
and night." There was no darkness before the dawn. 
Light and cosmos alone were primeval, — begotten 
of God. If the earth was ever without form and void, 
other spheres without number were shining and sing- 
ing in the firmament. Never a wreck that was not 
the refuse of former beauty, never a clod but from the 
decay of somewhat awaiting a resurrection ; and 
all that we call dead is cast-off clothing, mending for 
some new garment. It is the dropping of decay, 
which fresh vitality shall resume. Matter, which is 
multitude, follows Spirit, which is One. Our students 
overlook on Jacob's ladder the descending angels, 
prior in office to those that ascend. Creation is the 
condescension of the Most High to become the Most 
Low : not dust rising into Deity, but Deity stooping 
to dust. We can get the finite out of the Infinite ; but 
the process cannot be reversed. The manifold is the 
One, but without the One were no number. 

The fruit on the tree of life is from ideal planting. 
We are told that from material investigations has 
grown all benefit. But by some metaphysician, 
visionary or spiritual observer, every seed has been 
sown. Only to the kingdom of God have all the 
other good things been added. A pure perception, of 
which nothing visible was cause or more than occa- 
sion, in the mind of the physical explorer, — Newton, 
Kepler, Oken, Goethe, — led to every discovery from 
which inestimable utilities proceed. Abstract thinkers, 
as Kant and Plato, stop not in their service of intelli- 
gence till they lift the whole platform of action and 
plane of life. Matter is the false date that spoils our 



264 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

almanac. It makes every item of calculation decep- 
tive. From the cradle of Eternal Being all variety- 
springs. 

The fault of the last theory is in trying to evolve 
the entire man from what is below himself. His 
animal organism may be so unfolded. But he is 
spirit too. Something is let down as well as lifted up 
into him. Will our friend, who is following back the 
race into some primitive germ, please to account for 
his own presence and curiosity, — for his wish and 
power to classify? Whence his hunger after some- 
thing more than those creature-comforts for multiply- 
ing which the Baconian method is praised ? I want 
an explanation not only of the object which is his 
subject, but of the student himself and of the study ; 
and I find it only in some absolute Truth. 

On purely physical premises God himself is no 
Original, but only a conclusion. But out of the finite, 
which is all the understanding and senses can com- 
pass, only the finite comes. No heaping of finites 
can get nearer the Infinite than does a drop. Some 
logicians throw contempt on the pretence of a finite 
creature like man to any idea of infinity. But what if 
it should turn out that he is infinite himself ? In the 
Semitic, Hebraic, and Mahometan, as well as the too 
often pseudo-Christian thought, God and man are 
separate terms, so that the latter can reach the former 
only by some bridge. But the cause-yv2iy is the 
common nature of both. The mediator between God 
and man must be divine, and man must be divine for 
mediation to be possible. The phrase immutable^ 
addressed so continually to Deity by our clerical sires 



ORIGIN. 265 

in their prayers, seemed external, and implied this 
separate Being we are in relation with. But the 
Japhetic mind abolished this gulf, filled up the empty 
space, turned the interval into smooth continent, and 
saw the Unity which God and man together are. In 
the Greek gospel ascribed to John, Jesus says, " I and 
my Father are one ; " and in that last wonderful 
prayer for oneness in which all should meet, he means 
nothing personal to himself as an individual, but has 
a vision of the measureless life. Strange that the 
Gospel whose authenticity is questioned should pro- 
claim the spiritual verity which the Synoptics miss, 
though they do not contradict, and perhaps in the 
divine Fatherhood imply. Which narrative is the 
truest representation of the historic Saviour it is left 
to scholarship still to decide. But an insignificant 
minority of the Church has yet risen to the subliraer 
view. Even the P^ather is so outside as to be but a 
fetish unseen. The soul has idols as well as the 
sense. When I spoke of the Deity as changing to us 
with our own growth, some of my hearers were 
shocked, and one quoted against me the text, " with- 
out variableness or shadow of turning." But I replied 
that nothingwhich turns or casts a shadow is without 
God, or not part of him as much as the sun ; that he 
is not only the fixture, but the flow ; and that the same 
sacred book declares that he repented of having made 
man. 

But does not Divinity descend into and commu- 
nicate with the brute too? There are animals that 
mock man in their habits ; warm themselves at the 
fire, build lodgings among the trees, and fling broken 



266 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

branches at their pursuers. The ants emulate us in 
their wars. But none of them put telescopes to their 
eyes, hold pens in their hands, raise temples, found 
governments, save in the rudest fashion among the 
bees, beavers, and crows ; pass laws, have art to dis- 
cover truth or put eloquence on their tongues, or 
imitate with any of their horny armory the cannon- 
wheel that ploughs the earth for the seed of freedom 
and right. But they all partake this universal motion 
and will, which, no less than thought, expresses Deity. 
The head of the Phidian Jove speaks not only of 
reflection, but power and pity, to indicate the artist's 
and the Greek idea. Personality, self-consciousness, 
action as well as vision, is the lesson written in the 
world ; and some rudiments or relics of all our attain- 
ments may be detected in these inferiors, the poor 
relations we do not own, but may have yet to admit 
to a share in our proud generalities for mankind of 
free and equal birth-rights. Burns's adoption of the 
mouse for his fellow-creature hints in it some drop 
of the blood of which God is sacredly said to have 
made all nations. The St. Bernard (Jog, that saved 
the life of a wounded soldier by hugging him to his 
breast when every comrade had left, was entitled to 
rank among nurses. The Newfoundland one, that 
slept on his master's bed, but would not enter the 
chamber after the master's death, yet oftenest of any 
member of his family went to lie on the grave, might 
be classed among mourners. The one that gave me 
a daily greeting at the corner of my street, as cordial 
as any neighbor's, I certainly counted among my 
friends. 



ORIGIN. 267 

But in my recognition of these as members of the 
family reduced in their fortunes, who may have seen 
better days, let me not forget I have rich relations and 
a nobler kith and kin. Humboldt says, " I am an 
insect clinging to the surface of the earth." Did he 
think how nearly he adopted the theologic classifi- 
cation, — 

" What worthless worms are we"? 

I walk with the man of science up the rounds of 
organization from the dust. But let him not ask me to 
stop with the human form. I can show, of angels, no 
plates such as travellers fetch from their observations, 
or geologists give of fossil remains. But does nothing 
exist which cannot be so represented ? The trilobite 
may be ancestor of my body, but not father of my 
soul. That the scale of being ends in man is im- 
possible to think. It has no end nor beginning. It is 
that sort in mechanics called an endless chain. It 
is not a circle, but a spiral. Go down, microscope in 
hand, to the seed-vessel, to the animal cell, to the 
root in the ground, or dot or double-dot in the Q'g% ; 
to the sponge on the rock or increment of the crystal ; 
to the chemical atom ; to the infantile miniature of the 
plant betwixt the lobes of its little germ ; to the undu- 
lations of a ray of light, or the splendid blossoms 
among the softest tiny feathers of the bed of moss ; to 
the generation of colors by the crossing of flowers, or 
the hues in the marvellous sea-weeds that match the 
rose and pink, — are you nearer the bottom than when 
you set out? Can you tell if the bubbles you come 
to are the primal forms, or by whom they were blown ? 



368 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Go up to this globe of reason in the human head, and 
thence to this well of love in the human heart, are 
you nearer to the top ; or do you sit down weary as a 
child on the monumental stairs ? We build cemeteries. 
j Is there in God's works any graveyard that we can 
' set apart and consecrate to stay for a burial-ground, 
save as a spot of perpetual resurrection? Transfor- 
mation of species does not gainsay immortality ; for 
this is possible only by the convertibility and conver- 
sion of man into angel through some selection, adding 
buoyancy and leaving out what is earth-bound. When 
it please God to slide us off easy as sleeping to a new 
sphere, it will be no transmigration as of summer-birds, 
but transmutation of life. Does not the soul conceive 
its capacity to live and act without these special 
organs, and paint in tints of glory the heaven to 
which it goes.^ " The Father's house" was no struct- 
ure Jesus had seen ; but, more solid than any edifice, 
it was a reality his imagination projected. With In- 
finite Personality every person is safe, from the elder 
above to each mite of humanity. You have not lost 
your child. The spirit that shone in its soft eyes, 
moved in its tender limbs, beat in its gentle heart, and 
spoke in its inarticulate voice, has title to unfold beyond 
any seed of the garden and the field. We called the 
negro an ape ; and science avenges the insult by forc- 
ing us into the same relationship. They, whose 
bravery at Port Hudson and Fort Wagner no white 
ever surpassed, shamed millions of traitors or half- 
hearted patriots in the Free States. They were God's 
make- weight against the slavery they had suffered. 
They turned the tide of battle for the freedom by 



ORIGIN. 



269 



which alone the nation was saved. We owe the Com- 
monwealth to a black skin. If there be no future for 
the black man, let there be none for me ! 

The impossibility of running a boundary-line be- 
tween man and animal is hinted in the fact of their 
correspondence in every physical feature, which dis- 
covery of higher likeness with every close observation 
backs. It was thought the lower creatures have no 
conscience. But shame for misconduct, with suscepti- 
bility of correction and improvement in some of them, 
is plain. It was said they have no notion of God. 
What notion have we but in that sense of Being 
superior to ourselves, which the cow and ox show in 
our presence? It is said every day, the horse would 
not be so submissive if he knew his own strength. 
The lion, elephant, leopard, and tiger revere their 
keeper. We are told they have no language. But 
they communicate with each other. The sentinel- 
crow warns the flock. Many a bird calls its mate, 
with strophe and antistrophe of song. They under- 
stand much of our meaning in the natural language of 
expression. Whether they have or will ever reach 
arbitrary terms for abstract conceptions, or whether 
words are senseless in the parrot's mouth, let those 
who will presume to decide in the light of the train- 
ing they are capable of and progress they make. 
But must we not admit they have no ideas? The 
term idea subtends an arc so wide, from Plato to 
the savage brain, it is not easy to settle their share. 
But some representation of the world, and of the 
creature in it who assumes to be lord of the creation, 
they clearly possess and are governed by in their 



270 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

course. The squirrel I stoned when I was a thought- 
less boy, who stopped after much running in the centre 
of the ridge-pole of my father's barn, rose on his hind 
legs, and with his fore paws beat his breast, moved 
me with his prayer immediately to desist. Yet is any 
animal like man in proposing to himself an object in 
life ? One kind of dog seems to choose for his pro- 
fession the rescue of travellers from Alpine snows ; 
and another kind seems to make it his business to save 
from drowning, though known sometimes to seize and 
bear from the water such involuntary subjects of com- 
passion as only proposed to swim. The shepherd- 
dog's care of the flock shows more intelligence than 
some human servants, and is daily engaged in what 
looks wonderfully like a regular occupation. Do we 
choose, or are we led and impressed into our vocations ? 
Surely there are things men do and animals can- 
not, such as architecture, legislation, astronomy, and 
finance. But the question is whether, in what they 
are competent to, they show signs of similar faculties 
and dispositions ; so that students dispute, and are 
puzzled to know if man be an ascended brute, or the 
beast a descended man. The point of debate is 
whether an absolute demarcation can be run between 
them at any point, to make in Nature the vacuum she 
abhors. In our pride, we stand out for the godless 
gap. We inherit with our religion a traditional pre- 
judice from the Jews, whose sacred superiority and 
antipathy to animals had to be withstood by the com- 
mand not to muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. 
Paul bids, but I do not, " beware of dogs." But the 
just sympathy, in which man reaches out in our day 



ORIGIN. 271 

to woman, may extend at last to lower tribes. What 
limits this fellow-feeling may have to observe we have 
not yet defined. I have a friend who declines to 
molest mosquitoes in their feast on himself. But the 
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals finds 
itself obliged to discriminate, and, according to the 
humorous proverb, " draw the line somewhere," — one 
of the Thirty-nine Articles of its creed being for the 
encouragement of " insectivorous birds ; " while I have 
known a tender-hearted woman to bound her mercy 
the other way, with a wish that the mal-treater of a 
dray-horse might be removed by death ! 

But let us consider certain religious objections to 
this last view of human nature, which is now the main 
question under debate, not only in books of science, 
but in every newspaper of the secular and religious 
press, city parlor, sea-side piazza, and country town. 
To the first shock of the doctrine that the whole race 
did not arise from one couple, the cloud of Darwin 
adds the heavier clap that our ancestry runs back of 
all human creatures to the anthropoids, and behind 
even them to the first species and speck of organized 
being. 

This endless series, of which humanity is but a 
link, is supposed first to reflect on the Creator, by 
doing away with creation in any proper sense, and 
substituting for cause and effect, for voluntary divine 
production, not special development, but general 
evolution, interminable sequence of existences and 
events needing no spirit, but only matter, for their 
substance and source ; whereas the tale in Genesis 
presents a real Maker fashioning his child from the 



272 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

dust of the earth, and breathing into his nostrils the 
breath of life. But would God show more power, 
or man be clothed with greater honor, in this direct 
formation from the ground than by transformation of 
successive animal ranks? Did the earth lose worth, 
and was it soiled, by being shaped into a worm, a fish, 
a bird, before taking the upright figure? To the 
bishop denouncing such a transmission Mr. Huxley 
said, " Rather come from a monkey than be a block in 
the way of science ! " The biblical theologian, and 
obsequious naturalist who defers to the popular creed 
and explains Genesis, offer no appeal to reason, but an 
argument to pride, in trying to persuade us man was 
made apart from every other creature ; God stopping 
to draw a long breath and open a wide interval betwixt 
all that lives beside and him, that he might have the 
glory of a purely independent and isolated derivation. 
But attempt to conceive how this starting him all by 
himself took place. Did actual hands scoop the atoms 
from the soil, to mould, as an artist does the clay, into 
a perfect model of manhood? and did a mouth of 
flesh blow into the yet lifeless nostrils, to turn the stiff* 
corse into a moving frame ? Is that a credible mode 
of divine working ? and is transmutation step by 
step from inferior to superior incredible? It is so 
only to the superstitious caviller, not exploring the 
contents of his own thought, or affirming a literal 
dogma instead of thinking at all. 

The new hypothesis is not fully proven in any state- 
ment of it yet made. The record is imperfect. The 
trains of observation do not connect. But the objec- 
tion holds not good. You have seen the conjurer's 



ORIGIN. 273 

trick with his rings, now together and now apart, you 
could not tell how. Do distinguishable varieties of 
being suggest an Author more than an indissoluble 
chain ? You suspect materialism in this unfolding of 
life from stage to stage, with no possibly perceptible 
boundary-line. But is Deity revealed by intervening 
rather than by propelling from the first ? or is infinite 
power and wisdom required to project things one by 
one, as a sculptor does his statues, more than to 
fashion a mighty whole? It is thought the scientist 
would banish the Originator, and show the palace of 
Nature reared out of multiplied myriads of infinitesi- 
mal tiles. But it is absurd to fancy there ever was less 
or ever will be more universe, or that matter is a con- 
dition save as the consequence of mind. What is all 
existence but receptacle, prepared in the animal and 
enlarged in the human brain, while every instinct 
flows in, from what fountain who shall tell? It were 
as rational to say the granite reservoir makes the 
water it holds, as that the cerebral lobes create the 
thought and affection they are incarnate chambers of, 
and every nerve a service-pipe of the river of God. 
Shakspeare describes the ambitious man 

" Scorning the base degrees 
By which he did ascend." 

Our disgust at the notion that we are graduates of this 
primary school of the animals into the university of 
souls proves like arrogance, acquired through sin, not 
natural to the simple, unsophisticated mind. They 
are somehow our fellows. Why are children so fond 
of them, begging to be taken to the circus and men- 

18 



274 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

agerie, eager to feed the elephant as he comes out to 
swing his trunk, to visit by turns the tenant of every 
cage, and run after every dog and kitten, lamb and 
calf, chicken and bug? Because, as George Herbert 
says of the healing plants, they " find their acquaint- 
ance there." " Do you think that fine infant boy 
came from a monkey? " asked one. " He is a monkey 
himself," was the reply ; a speech the mother standing 
by did not seem to resent. " I always thought," said 
my friend, " the man was only something more than a 
monkey, and the monkey something less than a man." 
But which way does the motion take ? There is no 
law of progress by which every thing advances and 
nothing declines. If some angels are going up, others 
are coming down. The Maker is implicated in all. 
Were man to fall, God would go dov^n with him ! 
But particular men and tribes may sink to the brute 
and the worm. Some ethnologists see in the North 
American Indians the wreck and refuse of the ancient 
ten tribes of the Jews. A degraded race is harder to 
recover than an undeveloped one to ascend. Many a 
man is burying himself in some beast. I would be 
just and kind to every feeble member of a lowered 
humanity, Indian or African, for in every such mem- 
ber I see an undying soul ; but I would not lift a 
finger to perpetuate the race. A distinguished French- 
man told me he thought the French type was going 
down. Surely, the German type more deserves to 
be and propagate than that which in the modern 
Gaul has lived so long not on duty, but glory. What 
was the Commune but the last struggle of a nation to 
preserve itself in the quality of self- worship ? But, as 



ORIGIN. 275 

Goethe says, God will not see the once-loved features 
of the progenitors in the faces of a corrupted lineage. 
Without extinction, through long purgatory, by an ill- 
trained people must paradise be regained. All run- 
ning down is for re-creation, as Tennyson's "Vision 
of Sin " ends with an awful " rose of dawn." Fallen 
races, like fallen leaves, manure another growth. Out 
of latent or suppressed germs better timber springs 
through the ashes of worthless woods. Would not a 
section of the creation show eternal equality of the 
aeons in finer grades of quality than all the stuffs and 
goods of human art? The old mythology pictured 
the gods striding from hill to hill ; but there is no 
mincing step so nice and short as their degrees. The 
geologist cannot see the glacier move through the 
Alpine gorge ; but, as it must move unequally at the 
centre and the sides, he takes its measure by the rela- 
tive position, after a certain period, of a series of 
stakes. What pins shall denote changing combina- 
tions of the smaller particles of magnetism, electricity, 
heat, and light, to build the living frame or inanimate 
things? 

Yet, according to the Primer, this is not creation at 
all. Did not God make the world out of nothinsr? 
Try to imagine a time when was no universe. We 
can no more think away Nature than God. A naked 
Deity, or blank Unity with no diversity. One without 
many, is an unreal idea of impossible fact. The 
Trinity is a philosophic attempt to escape from a 
barren and bald monotheism. But no less preposter- 
ous an Infinite Parent from all eternity, with but one 
child. All that is must have for ever been. Like a 



376 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

changeable silk, the Almighty's robe, glimmering in 
the light of his countenance, makes the only altera- 
tion. Miracles — are there several, or but one impene- 
trable wonder through innumerable forms ? Were the 
sea to ridge itself a dry-shod path, or the sun to rest 
on his axle, the green bush to burst into flame, or the 
water become wine, I should not be more amazed, 
however confounded and stupefied, than by every 
regular phenomenon and ordinary procession. My 
objection to miracles is not the scientist's, for he is 
incompetent to disprove them ; nor the scholar's, of 
not evidence enough ; but the child's, that a Father 
leadino; should turn round to confront his own method 
and take it all back. Whatever, like the marvellous 
healings, we have a gleam and inkling of in Nature, 
we can accept as going on from the least experience 
to the farthest reach. If species are distinct, every 
new one seems an added prodigy. But God is no 
theatrical scene-shifter, shoving aside his doors and 
curtains to let in new figures. Would dislocation 
more than gradual action show his might? He saw 
his way clear through ! What characteristic of crea- 
tion is wanting in the imperceptibly nice operation of 
his hand ? A cataclysm, earthquake, eruption, thunder- 
bolt, billow, startles us more. But is there greater 
ease or less mystery in the opening of a leaf, waxing of 
the dawn, or flow^ of the tide? The sublimity is not 
God's caldron of the volcano, or kettle of the water- 
spout, or sledge-hammer of the sea ; but the atom he 
makes his tool. With that, too small for our sight, 
he rears the mountains from the depths or shaves the 
rocks to the plain, blends a few elements into potent 



ORIGIN. 



277 



substances thousand-fold and dissolves them again, 
strengthens every bone and swells every fibre, or 
wastes gigantic sinews away. Nothing can turn its 
edge. With that chisel too small to see he shall cut 
us down, lay us low in our coffin, and with that trowel 
build us up again. His finger it shall be to pick us 
out of our grave ; and his vital sculpture, not by 
diminution but increase, for our resurrection into 
smooth, seraphic shapes. What are those strange 
powers Goethe writes of as " the mothers" but these 
agents out of sight? That man results from their 
inscrutable instrumentation is no disinheritance from 
his privilege of a heavenly birth. 

But the theory of man's animal derivation is sup- 
posed to do away with his personal identity. If this 
means an absolutely separate self, so that your will or 
mine is an independent monad, like a monolith or 
monograph standing alone, undetermined by motives 
and unconnected with other wills, there is in such insu- 
lation no fe7'sonal quality. Personality is the sound- 
ing through us of no private wish, but of universal 
truth, as his part does through the actor, or a tune 
through pipe or string. Personality unites us with 
our kind, and expresses the common interest. When, 
as I heard a host tell his guests at table tofall to^ we 
set about satisfying carnal appetite, or parading in our 
peculiar set of jewels and silks, and being angry at 
imitators of our costume or turn-out, or seeking selfish 
aggrandizement, we may be individual, but we cease 
to be personal. We express or enhance the general 
welfare no more than a hawk stooping for its prey, a 
peacock lifting his tail, or pigs feeding at their trough. 



2 7ei RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Isolation is not the quality of a person, but rather of a 
brute. Even the lower creatures shame our by-ends 
in their flocks and herds, playing together as I lately 
saw two robins ; and as dogs delight to, more than to 
bark and bite. I think Watts maligned them. Men 
and women commonly take more pleasure in a quarrel 
than they. Do not the wedges of emigrant fowl, that 
cleave the autumnal sky, show in such sociality of a 
general concern some degree of that personality our 
philosophy denies? Sympathetic service measures 
your personality,. It is the overflow of affection from 
dateless tribes. 

Woman, the flower of humanity, like the sweet 
crystal from the last refinement of the sugar-cane, 
seems oftener than man to scorn the notion of animal 
origin. Yet what more is her beautiful hair than a 
relic from the skin of some progenitor beyond Esau ? 
Let the gay lady be ashamed rather of her velvet train 
sweeping across the parlor-floor, leaving no room for 
anybody's feet ! I ain not mortified at my trail 
stretching back over the floor of creation, in nobody's 
way. Is it less credit to have come vitally transmitted, 
or transmuted from lower but ever rising orders, than 
mechanically dredged out of the ground? Our per- 
sonal identity consists in our intoning what inspires 
us from the past for the whole present and future 
good, through our particular gift ; as a special melody 
is voiced by the entire atmosphere playing through 
trumpet or flute. But the individualism that would 
compass an exclusive benefit is a vice. 

Yet no charge is more frequently false. We are 
accused of individualism for declining to join some 



ORIGIN. 279 

particular sect. Some of us are marked as flagrant 
examples for not being members of an association 
or conference. Belong to what party you will ; but 
plead "Not guilty" when you are flung at because 
you serve none in politics or religion. If you are un- 
social and unkind, indifferent to philanthropic enter- 
prise, an enemy to the freedom in others you enjoy 
yourself, a hoarder of advantage at the expense of the 
common stock, then you are individualistic ; but not 
for failing to be an active zealot in any denomination. 
Is there not more individualism in ambition to be 
prominent on the platform, where some men and 
women not waiting to be invited procure their own 
opportunity to speak, or in travelling from Dan to 
Beersheba for small upshot of help to the community, 
and getting one's name clothed with flattering compli- 
ment in the newspapers, than in silence and absence 
for disinterested toils? Was Beethoven, Raphael, 
Milton, individual in the bad sense, for being each busy 
in composing, and each a composition of the breath 
of God, rather than running every day to some clique 
or club ? Let truth and cheer come out of your closet, 
as Jesus sent them from mountain and desert to man- 
kind ; and, though never seen where men most do 
congregate, who shall question your personal claim? 
If he that says I am be our Author, persons we are, 
whether we can tell how or not. Whence I came, I 
will not bother my head. Here I am alive, to love 
you and worship God. What if I cannot account for 
my genealogy, and map or photograph the family 
tree? Does the scientist say certain phenomena are 
all ? But how of himself, the observer ? How hap- 



28o RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

pens it he observes? Will he please to analyze his 
own curiosity, to put things in a row, and have an 
hypothesis? He interests me more than the strata 
and coral-reefs, and fishes and beasts, in his discourse. 
Why leave himself, the man, out? He must pardon 
me, if I consider the experimenter more than the 
retort or oyster-shell in his hand. He is a person, 
offshoot of Person Infinite, in whatever bit of ante- 
diluvian cradle, too minute to see, he lay. 

But many philosophers and Christians revolt from 
this unity of the animal with the man, because it does 
away with immortality. But what ground is weak- 
ened, on which you have credited a future life ? Is the 
Lord's rising proof of yours? Is that rising disproved 
because man is older than the garden of Eden, has a 
chimpanzee for his far-off' cousin, or a trilobite for his 
sire? The old burial-service implies a resurrection of 
the body. Can it not rise as easily if descended from 
any or every branch of the animal kingdom, as if 
composed, as the story tells, of the crude silt it shall 
dissolve into, or of the gravel dropping on its casket 
from the sexton's spade? But those animals in the 
one long lineage embracing us are not immortal : 
why should we be any more? What know we of 
their destiny, but from that Old Testament text about 
" the beasts that perish " ? Some of them better 
deserve to live, are more faithful and patient, than 
some men ; show more consideration and conscience 
than their masters. As Bacon says man is the dog's 
God, the dog is sometimes more worshipful than his 
owner. That beings in heaven will be all of one sort, 
nothing- but angels, as we commonly conceive them, 



ORIGIN. 381 

with crowns and palms and harps, is hard to think. 
It would be monotonous and tiresome ! There must 
be not less, but more, diversity than here. The 
trouble in the argument is not any prejudice of our 
prospects from the new theory ; but, like some people 
who have got on in the world, and cannot speak to 
their humbler kith and kin, we do not want to have 
these poor quadrupeds for our associates because we 
are ashamed of the connection. Two of their feet 
having in us been promoted into hands, so we have 
got the upper hand. But, in the birds, as if God 
would reprove our pride, are not two of the feet be- 
come wings, which we covet and expect by and by.? 
I have a mighty fine notion of my flesh, and hesitate 
to think it bears a freight of saurian monsters, circu- 
lates megatherium blood, had a mastodon's bulk for 
its crib, is the bier on which myriad relics of vital 
antiquity are borne, and shall find its own grave and 
revival in who knows what coming animated forms ! 
But why should I be made of finer stuff'.? God has no 
porcelain, but one clay ; and all the vital fluid at bot- 
tom is the same. The materialist tells me he doubts 
immortality, not being able to credit the reassembling 
of his particles ; and he says to the bereaved, " I have 
neither faith nor philosophy to comfort you." But we 
do not want the particles reassembled ! When my 
body has dropped, let it go. It is mine no longer. 
I have no more use for it : let me be reclothed ! The 
theory of human nature as part of a grand evolution, 
instead of a haughty pillar standing alone, and so 
more apt to tumble down, encourages my hope. If 



282 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

we survive, it is not by travel, but transformation, 
another step of development above ourselves, as we 
are above something else that went before. The 
problem of futurity is how to get one species into 
another, — the species man into the species angel ; 
and, on the doctrine of strictly specific creation or 
inconvertibility of species, our expectation could not 
flourish, but suffers fatal blight. If man has got out 
of an immemorial infancy into his present altitude, 
what limits shall be put to his ascent? It is all dark 
and unseen. But humanity once was out of sight and 
reach as are the cherubim and seraphim now. 

How shall we come to port across the sea? God, 
whom we launched and sailed from, cannot surprise 
us with the celestial more than the terrestrial shore. 
As, in the Pacific, some wave lifts the sailor's boat over 
tlie reef into the lagoon, we shall rise. Such faith 
is not damped, but kindled, by the idea that man was 
made not, according to the supposed Scripture chron- 
ology, by a sudden thought, six thousand years ago, — 
but was from measureless cycles looked forward to, 
with long-minded plan, in the least structure and 
faintest beginning of organized life. If I was thought 
of so early, contemplated before the morning-stars 
sang together, from the foundation of the world ; 
if the great Architect had in view every room and 
column of my proportions in his original design, so 
that each joint of form and fit of faculty has an an- 
tiquity to which the Pyramids are but yesterday, and 
the globe itself but as a painter's easel ; if the sky be 
the Artist's chamber, and time my Author's stepping- 



ORIGIN. 283 

stone, — then may I not believe that the care for me, 
which was from everlasting, will be to everlasting; 
and sing with David, " Thou wilt not leave my soul 
in the grave ; " and say with Jesus, '' Now come I to 
thee"? 



XII. 

CORRELATION. 

THE mind seeks unity. He has no genius for 
philosophy who is seduced and satisfied with 
any multiplicity, trinity, or duality. The heart, too, 
is content only with the One, mistake that One though 
it may. The dissipated man is he whose afiection 
roves among a thousand objects, however he abstain 
from sensual indulgence. But the true soul loves one 
worth, delights in one beauty appearing in many 
forms. Also, the conscience discerns one right in 
manifold circumstances and cases of business, personal 
intercourse, and social reform : as Cicero said so long 
ago, sublimely, " There is not one law at Athens, and 
another at Rome." The soul, moreover, worships 
one Spirit. The sin of idolatry consists not simply 
in fastening veneration on an outward thing ; but the 
moment it is diverted from the Infinite Unity, it will 
be distracted among " gods many and lords many," 
and catch up any fancy for its fetish. The objection 
to defining religion as "a recognition of the facts 
and laws of the universe " is not only that it misses 
the sense of Deity, — the trembling and peace of the 
breast, — but that, beside leaving out person, it divides 
thought. 



CORRELATION. 285 

Yet difference is not duplicity. All diversity is 
unity produced, as a million sunbeams continue the 
sun. It is the radiation of God. It is the graduation 
of essence into substance, and of substance into exist- 
ence. It is extension of centre into circumference, 
and general into particular ; there being no special 
providence of exception to eternal rule. Deuce is 
the devil. There are no two v^^here the second is not 
part or repetition of. the first and last — alpha and 
omega — to whom will go the homage which we must 
pay, if we do not pervert. He will idolize who 
does not, adore. The materialist, who scorns the no- 
tion of prayer, adopts a huger idol fashioned to his 
hand than was ever set up in Mexican temple or 
savage hut. 

In the modern doctrine of correlation of forces is a 
blazing illustration of this unitary quality. Correla- 
tion of truths and duties is as perfect as of the parallels 
and meridians of the globe. We sail on a great circle 
when we heed the smallest obligation. An eminent 
man, reproached with having been a drummer when 
he was a boy, asked, "Didn't I drum well.?" When 
Mr. Bergh collects half a bushel of cunningly con- 
cealed spurs from beneath the horses' bits in Central 
Park, how distinguish his from any apostle's benev- 
olent zeal ? 

There is, then, such a central unity in the human 
frame, we can let on our entire strength for any 
task, — as the Merrimac turns a spindle, or the Cochit- 
uate throws up a column, with the complete height 
and weight of its uppermost tide. We say of a 
man prompt in action, cordial in salutation, or zeal- 



286 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

ous for anv end, he is not double-minded or half- 
hearted, but whole-souled. 

One power in diverse manifestation is the lesson of 
Nature. Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and mo- 
tion are the same essence, convertible into each other, 
displaying that single manifold Force we call God, in 
the physical universe. 

The same fact is in our constitution. The senses — 
sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch — are different modes 
of perception, and meet in one sensorium. 

Moreover, the faculties of the mind — memory, 
judgment, imagination, wit, and will — express the 
various activity of the one intellect, or inmost knowing 
instinct, which remembers, imagines, chooses, invents, 
or compares. 

So with the character. Truth, justice, love, good- 
ness, courage, mercy, are not contradictory or alien 
one from the other. An identical conscience is dis- 
tributed to the need of the hour. All the virtues of 
behavior are offspring of one virtue in the breast ; and 
if a man is guilty in one point, he is guilty of all. As, 
in the fountain on the Common, the same water is 
played through a number of jets into the likeness of a 
pillar, a flower, or a fan, — all that is requisite being 
to have a head of water to which to fit every mouth- 
piece, — so good affection streams into whatever con- 
duct our relations determine, or the occasion demands. 
Outward integrity means this complete equipment 
from one holy purpose. 

We are governed by circumstances, say some. Not 
we, only the lines of our activity. The power or 
quality of our purpose is not governed by circum- 



CORREI.ATION. 287 

stances. Is the lightning governed by the lightning- 
rod? The circumstances are only the conductors of 
the " centre-stances," in our motives and aims, be they 
low and selfish, or lofty and humane. Wind and 
v^ave are circumstances. Is the pilot victim of cir- 
cumstances vs^hen the ship is cast away, or of his own 
ignorance and negligence ? The same circumstances 
carried other vessels to port. The Scotia arrives 
and the Cambria goes down in the same gale. By 
the same temptations which some souls founder in 
others are sped. 

We think one moral property higher or better than 
another. But each is of tantamount worth. Justice 
is as good as benevolence. Truth is never contrary to 
mercy. Courage does not withstand meekness. Self- 
respect is not opposed to humility. All these traits are 
but the methods one intent operates through by turns. 
To be master of the situation is to know which part of 
speech in the voice and word of God is in order, what 
temper to show, what stand with interlocutors or inter- 
actors to take. Doing with the sum total of our being 
what Providence in the premises calls for, that is per- 
fection. 

The judge dispenses equity on the bench. Stern 
we call him, or inexorable. But is it not kindness to 
the criminal to arrest him in his course .f* Were it not 
unkind to the community to let him go scot-free ? 

We protest against the enacting of hell on earth in 
this horrid business of war. A war of words is de- 
clared against Bismarck, and a woman's congress 
called for peace. But whether fighting is wrong 
depends on whether it is in place, — the thing in the 



288 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Divine plan at the time to be done. You see the refuse 
of the field, at certain seasons, raked together by the 
farmer, and the heap set on fire. What is war but 
the flame with which the great Husbandman burns up 
the refuse of sin and folly in the field of the world ? 
Is it necessary, unavoidable, this Judgment- day? 
Then it is divine. The Prussian minister wishes to 
unify Germany, and out of a bundle of States like 
loosened rods to make a great nation. France is 
jealous that Germany will be too strong, as England 
was that America would ; and war is the incident he 
has to encounter in his design, and must manage as 
he best may. It was the incident we had to encounter 
for the same purpose, — to preserve, bind together, 
and new-create our own land. At last, the French 
fight not for conquest but national self-preservation. 
Is the soldier, the volunteer, or drafted, instrument to 
this end, on either side a savage wild beast and mere 
brute? Should we allow anybody to say it in our 
case ? No : the man who, when fighting alone was 
left the last resort and means of salvation for country, 
for liberty, for humanity, fought and fell in the trench 
or wilderness, on the plain, or bloody slippery deck 
when the Cumberland went down, not hating his 
enemy or the public enemy, whom yet he saw it was 
indispensable to overcome, — that man died as nobly 
as any passive sufferer persecuted to death, burnt or 
hung by religious or political foes. " I have no ill- 
will to the South," said Putnam : "I hope they will 
fight well." 

The martyr is thought a grander character than 
the hero. Either is alike grand, as either is fit for 



CORRELATION. 289 

the hour. When one said, "John Brown made the 
gallows glorious like the cross," some were shocked 
that should be said of the armed invader of Harper's 
Ferry. But his purpose, in the sublime bravery of 
attacking a sovereign State with a handful of men, 
and the patience as sublime of submitting to the sen- 
tence of the court, — remarking, as he went to the 
gibbet, on the beauty of the Virginia hills, — were 
the same temper that Master and apostle showed on 
Roman engines of torture. He bound up martyr and 
hero in his own person. 

One soul moved by one Spirit maintains its level 
best in every exigency. We speak of cardinal virtues. 
But every virtue is cardinal that is seasonable. Only 
put the whole of yourself into the errand of the mo- 
ment, as the ocean makes high tide successively at 
each point of the shore. The spider sits in the centre 
of its web of myriad strands. Whatever interferes 
with one of those gossamer lines draws the whole 
creature bodily, in watch and act, to that point. A 
many-sided man we style him whose talent applies at 
all quarters with equal ease. Cast your entire vitality 
and eternal redemption on a hair-breadth of instant 
responsibility, as our Chicago brothers did at the fire. 

A woman is insulted, and the sphere of her sensi- 
bility invaded. She knows it, and the villain-invader 
knows. Her whole womanhood rises to resent and 
repel the hostile or disrespectful approach. The 
schoolmen said the whole of God is in every particle : 
the whole of her is at the point of menace. She is 
gentle and humble, charitable, a Lady Bountiful, 
gracious and sweet as summer to your courtesy. But 

19 



290 



RADICAL PROBLEMS. 



your rude encroachment shall discover how much 
less terrible the wrath of the lion than the wrath 
of the lamb. The recoil from indecency, affront at 
insolent familiarity, rebuff of injury, is as loft}^, be- 
comes her as much, pleases God as truly, and is 
entered in as shining letters in the recording angel's 
book, as her most generous gifts and loving accents 
and winning looks, by which, with parallel closeness, 
some other position is matched. The soul has no 
corps de reserve. All is engaged. Run, without 
scruple, to the obligation now ringing at the door. It 
has been said, by a famous doctor of divinity, Jesus 
would not have driven the traders out of the temple 
at the close of his career. A scourge for others less 
became him whose crucifixion was his crown ! But 
that Father's business he was about having many 
departments and details, — now a disputation with the 
doctors, and now a last supper with his friends, — 
whatever demonstration was timely, each diverse 
performance or endurance that embodied unqualified 
devotion proved the same worth ; and he needs not 
the apology of some that the lash may have lighted 
only on the lazy oxen, unconscious of profaning the 
marble shrine, when it belonged so much more riclily 
to the human chafferers that were switclied out. It 
was the same whole and faithful soul, changing its 
operation as the conditions changed, that fell to the 
ground with the bloody sweat in the Garden. He 
was not in the despair which radical and consei'vative 
theologians suppose. But the burdens were so great, 
he had to summon all his strength, even that he 
ordinarily used to stand up with, to sustain them. 



CORRELATION. 



291 



With economy, he accomplished every jot of the de- 
sign before him there and then. At a hard question 
we drop the head, because we need the power it is 
held up by to think with. Some persons, when they 
wish to reflect expeditiously and with all their might, 
lie down at full length. Jesus prostrated himself, to 
concentrate his capacity for what Heaven bade, — not 
to give up ! 

This is the sum of morals. For what work strikes 
the clock ? Meet the emergency, be it action or resig- 
nation, in zeal or self-control, with all the genius 
that lies in you, — now for speed, anon masterly inac- 
tivity, as the engine uses the same pressure of steam 
to go forward or back. Each is good, each is best 
alternately, according to the object in view. But each 
must have the whole power, whichever way it goes 
on the track. Do not try to move two ways at once, 
with your mind more than with your vehicle. The 
result is obliquity and overthrow, not rectitude in 
either. There is no such thing as " a divided duty : " 
'tis always simple. The eye cannot look on two 
things, even separate panes of glass, with the same 
glance, but passes with lightning rapidity from the 
first to the second. Yet a covert purpose or by-end, 
instead of the ostensible one, is the great sin of man- 
kind. We call it diplomacy, policy, expediency : " All 
which words," I heard my friend say, " I hate." We 
say of a man, who is always after something other 
than he professes or pretends, that he has two crowns 
in his head, making a type of the hair which in some 
heads is confused by curling to a point in two circles, 
and hard to comb out. The real man or woman is 



292 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

often so twisted as to be impossible to get at. There 
is no simplicity, or central and all-absorbing affection 
or aim. " There are two," is said of an inconsistent 
man. Sometimes there are twenty. How. many 
a friend will assign false motives for his conduct ! 
He has neglected us somehow, and wants to excuse 
himself. So he tells how much he wanted to be 
with us, but had to go elsewhere. " I wanted to be in 
your house, or at church." No : you did not. People 
do what they want to! You want to keep your 
friend, but not your vow. As easily serve God and 
Mammon ; as soon pull opposite poles together. A 
fictitious reason for what we do or fail to do is the 
commonest lie, and the worst ; for it is a lie we cannot 
prove upon anybody, or properly charge him with. 
It is lying in that interior sphere we cannot presume 
to inspect. The lie of circumstance, saying the thing 
that is not, is harmless in comparison. For that we 
can provide some antidote. If you have prevaricated 
in act, prevaricate not also in speech. Your apology 
is the dirty sponge, adding more uncleanness than it 
removes. We do not want a part or fraction. " Out 
upon this half-faced fellowship ! " Neutrality, indiffer- 
ence, facing both ways, says Dante, is hateful to God 
and to the enemies of God. 

Concentred energy is the miracle. The man in 
the lighthouse or observatory is all eye, and can see 
a glint of the tossing bark, far off in the storm, w^hen 
you can see nothing. It is because the whole of him 
sees. You did not notice.^ Your inadvertence is 
your fault. Perception is integrity. Not to mind is 
not to obey. There is a correlation of the vices. 



CORRELATION. 293 

Do not cheating and lies, drunkenness and lust, the 
spendthrift and thief, go together? Take home one 
of Satan's relations, and the whole family will follow. 
Be profuse, and you will be mean : be ungenerous, 
and you will be unjust. " Economy is revenue^^ 
thundered the British orator. Frugality is the fund of 
charity. "Be just, before you are generous"? No: 
be just, and you will be generous. The politeness of 
the man that has just swindled me was part of his 
theft : it was the velvet over the claw. Does he see 
how he wrongs himself, like the mower striking at a 
harmless creature with the handle of his scythe, and 
cutting off his own head with the blade } Profanity 
in the street puts on another guise in the sanctuary. 
But does an honest oath break with God more than a 
formal prayer? 

Excellencies cluster like grapes. In our version, 
*' add to your faith, knowledge," with the rest of the 
list, the figure of a chorus in the Greek word is lost. 
Three Graces^ nine Muses^ three Furies^ — always 
a choir ! Every virtue, said the sage doctor, hangs 
round filial piety. In our cheap moralizing, we set 
the heart and' head in opposition. But, when Napo- 
leon's brother complained of the Emperor's want of 
affection, he answered, " My love has the dimensions 
of my mind," — not weak fondling of a kinsman, but 
legislation for Europe ! 

Thought is correlate of feeling, goes as deep in the 
mind of God or man. The preacher in doubting this 
is a sentimentalist, not a sage. We oppose the inward 
to the outward. They are not antagonist, but part and 
counterpart. The wind that bloweth where it listeth 



294 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

sometimes rises within and sometimes breezes from 
without. I have felt it in a Qiiaker meeting, and 
through the Lord's Supper, making every vessel, 
touched by departed saints, dear. Any way, every 
way, and always, let us turn to take it with our 
sails. 

The vital point is that which the physicist overlooks. 
In the relations he loses the relationship. What is the 
correlating power but the Living Absolute, whose rest 
is all motion, whose abode is in every reference, and 
whose immutability ceaseless change? In vain to 
separate the spectacle into portions, make specialties 
of study, and affirm there are only phenomena. The 
countless drops run out of and into one. To that 
which renders it possible for a single energy or ele- 
ment to appear now as light and now as electricity, 
now as memory and now as judgment, now as recti- 
tude and now as wisdom, now as vision and now 
as love, now a principle and now a rite, we must 
bend. 

The correlation of human qualities arises from that 
of the Divine attributes. It is a false notion of both 
Orthodox and Liberal that God's equity was ever post- 
poned or preferred to his pity. The laws of justice 
are not confounded in some mixture or after-thought 
called mercy, as forgiveness outright, or a composition 
for offenders by some innocent proxy suffering in their 
stead. There is no such misprision of treason, or com- 
pounding of felony, or partaking of crime. Leniency 
to a bad man may be the greatest cruelty. Indulgence 
is a morass of surrender where no virtue of kindness 
or sincerity can plant its foot, or a fellow-creature be 



CORRELATION. 295 

reached with help. The Deity is no weakling to set us 
such an example. Let our demand of honor and in- 
fliction of discipline emulate his ! His retribution is 
not revenge, but kindness suited to the case. Mercy 
does not so much, as Shakspeare says, temper justice, 
as express it ; and law is the hand of love. 

Human callings are correlative. What iniquity to 
set one honest trade against another, or make capital- 
ists and artisans foes ! The correlation of manual and 
mental labor is the core of political economy. The 
provoker of a duel betwixt them forgets their common 
bond. He is a superficial moralist to classify, as the 
old mineralogists did their stones, not by inward na- 
ture but external marks. Is not the body concerned 
in all labor? Yet labor is never a thing of mere 
muscle or nerve. Are not intelligence, will, fidelity, 
and the sweat of the brow alike in the student's and the 
digger's task ? The mechanic often gets better wages 
for easier effort than the poet or the priest, who some- 
times come near to starve. Some of the law-offices 
and one-half the pulpits are less remunerative than 
the master-carpenter's shop. The toil of the man 
that makes my road, lays out my grounds, turns my 
rock ravine into a stairway to the sea, and beneath 
boulders and rough fragments — the wreck of ages — 
discovers a beach, I rate as of more value than some 
sermons and prayers. Were all the mechanics em- 
ployed in rearing the temple, or do some conduct the 
exercises within? Ceremonies may be more lifeless 
than any tools, trowel or axe. There are automatons 
in the professions ; there are thinkers in the mill and 
field ; and he may add less value to the Commonwealth 



296 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

who hammers at an argument or homily than he who 
beats on a lap-stone or a nail. How brainless or un- 
fair not to heed the finer conscientious property which 
may appear in any avocation, and is absent from the 
unfaithful in every class, but should unite all ! The 
agitator assumes a conflict of interests that does not 
exist. He is a fish so used to troubled waters, that he 
feels lost and not at home, unable to swim, in the 
smooth. In default of an angel, he descends himself 
to stir up the pool, in which none will be healed. 
With no mystic quality of worshipping God in history 
or sympathetic imagination of mankind, his mind has 
a cruel edge. Sincere and earnest he may be, but 
without wisdom or depth. 

No pursuit is virtuous, only some man in every 
pursuit. Let us not be deceived by appearances. You 
are looking in the wrong place, we say to one who 
discerns not some object or resemblance we point out. 
How continually we do that ! Before a picture of a 
dying soldier and of a sister of charity, a keen dis- 
cerner of look and posture said, " I see the religion 
here in the face and figure of the wounded man more 
than of the woman who assumes to be its minister." 
Were the missionaries, who sent a tract about the im- 
penitent thief to distribute in the army, themselves 
more honest than the brave troops that went down to 
the bloody plain? 

We set the Past against the Future. They are 
friends. "Does he approve your view?" I was very 
recently asked, respecting a great scholar. " Not 
now," was my reply ; " but when it becomes history 
he will." He that but conceives a thought finds in 



CORRELATION. 



297 



another's expression of it only a premature birth. But 
tradition and inspiration agree ; 

And sage experience doth attain 
To something like prophetic strain." 

If the critic denies only to define, restricts and excludes 
error to affirm truth, is he not conservative.? Let me 
never v^rite a line nor speak a word whose object is to 
pull down ! I would only tear away to build, and blow 
up to arrest the fire, — as Jesus destroyed to fulfil. 
In a battery is the positive hostile to the negative pole ? 
The organizer has no quarrel with the seer. Without 
vision every institution would decay, like a body un- 
supplied with fresh blood. The humblest members 
have no strife with the highest. When my head failed, 
I took to my feet. On the vessel's deck, amid burning 
sand, under the peak of Tenerifl^e, through the pine 
barrens of Florida, and along the Atlantic shore, I 
walked back into heart and brain some drop of feeling, 
some spark of thought. Society is a growth ; and he 
is a public enemy who would interrupt its continuity, 
or thinks to cure its diseases by taking it apart. But 
it feeds on truth as new as last year's wheat. It is — 

" One armj of the living God." 

But does the host incur danger from the scouts it sends 
ahead, to be in Milton's phrase " all ear " ? Aber- 
nethy detected disease at a glance. Let us honor 
the political physician who notes and treats the nation's 
ills. 

In the vast system, let each, resigning selfish inde- 
pendence, act his part and receive his just income of 
love and peace. " Keep to the right as the law 



298 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

directs ! " Ask only what belongs to you. The world 
is large. There is room for me and thee. Do friends 
drop off and favors cease ? It is no accident. Do not 
regret or deprecate, do not wish or forebode. Let 
go what is not by eternal affinity yours. Your tax you 
cannot avoid, your property you will never lose. " I 
will not strain myself," said Daniel Webster, " to kill a 
fly." The bar that keeps you out you cannot break : 
the bolt admitting you turns with ease. This correla- 
tion is God's high chancellor to see that justice is 
done. Do you disparage my sei*vice, and drop out 
of the circle of my companions and friends ; and do 
you justify your desertion with poor apologies, putting 
your disloyalty on false grounds? Waste not so your 
words, nor spend a thought or breath on the matter ! 
I shall not suffer : take care of yourself, and have no 
alarm for me. Like the watchers in the judges' boat 
at the regatta on the river or the sea, God has his 
sentinels in the heart to secure fair play and punish 
foul. I shall make up in self-respect for your dis- 
countenance, just as, with my humility, I shall set 
limits to your praise. What are the scales on your 
court-house to Heaven's universal balance.? Great 
evils to the black man were predicted from the aboli- 
tion of slavery. But a right to his own earnings sup- 
plies motive better than came from the lash. 

" Nebber you fear, though nebber you hear 
The driver blow his horn." 

Against all temptations to treachery one thought is an 
overweight, — that of being a pure instrument of truth. 
The idea of God's service, in that of his creatures, 



CORRELATION. 299 

clean of all pride or vanity, or lust of gain or count 
of worldly success, stirs a joy with which no human 
favor can compare. Applause is a passing, pattering 
rain ; popularity, the morning cloud and early dew : 
benefit is the well springing up unto everlasting life. 



XIII. 

CHARACTER. 

WHAT reason the Oriental had to suppose di- 
vinity or divination in dreams I know not ; only 
that I dreamed being in a great conference discussing 
Jesus Christ, till his naine flew back and forth as 
between battle-door and shuttlecock, when at last he 
himself rose in the meeting to hush and astonish all 
with the words, " Touch me not ! " What meant that 
repulse of Mary after the reported resurrection ? Was 
he a ghost, such as Homer or Virgil tells of, whom 
the hand would pass through? Did he reserve his 
first greeting for another? Rather, saluting Mary and 
asking Thomas to test his flesh and blood reality, he 
yet declares to the fond woman. The time to dote on 
me is past : God whom I go to is as much your Father 
as mine. Let no critic call rude his rejection of what- 
ever sign of regard she so naturally rushed to give ! 
He threw cold water on her affectionate zeal to con- 
centrate its flame for the shaping of all duty at the 
forge of her heart. 

This was the topmost round of Christ's character. 
One step above self-sacrifice on the cross was the self- 
abnegation after the crucifixion. Not that he would 



CHARACTER. -jqi 



disparage himself. He knew and asserted he was a 
showing of God ; but, having shown him, he would 
retire. What appearance on the stage could match 
such self-withdrawal! Does any action transcend a 
•graceful taking leave? He was a medium, whose 
virtue is to display the object, — like a window where 
nothing but the entry lamp is visible within. " You 
cannot see him : he is behind his Master," said Father 
Taylor, of a famous preacher. You see not the Mas- 
ter ^.s he reveals the all-informing soul ; as you do not 
the man who unveils a picture in some great cathe- 
dral, to be the valet of its beauty the business of his 
life. On the Wengern Alp I admired the spotless air 
that hid and denied itself, to draw the Jungfrau from 
its ten-miles distance almost to touch my eye. This 
temper of self-renunciation Jesus hinted not at the close 
only, but throughout his career. He resented being 
called good: he was willing anybody should speak 
against hzm, but not against the Holy Ghost. He 
insisted it was expedient for him to go away, to in- 
troduce the Comforter whom his longer stay would 
eclipse, but whose coming would lead beyond his 
lessons into all truth. What finer incident in history 
than that after the walk to Emmaus, when at the 
village table the old gesture in breaking bread be- 
trayed and they knew him, and " he vanished out of 
their sight"! As the absence of his statue brought 
Brutus to mind, Christ was manifest less in his advent 
than his exit. It is a paradox of beauty. His arrest 
of us is his refusing to be stopped with. Did Csesar 
or Cromwell or Washington decline the crown? He 
would be neither king nor idoj, ♦' Oh, that is he!'' we 



302 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

say, when some man's quality is spoken of. We have 
Jesus only in being passed on by him. To worship him, 
if it be Orthodoxy, is infidelity and rejection of Chris- 
tianity, and flat contradiction of his own bidding. To 
make him a finality is to make him a fetish. As an 
idol we lose him altogether. In the novel "Jane Eyre," 
Rochester says he could seize the woman he loves, 
but the essence he seeks would be gone. O fond be- 
liever ! in your so tight grasp of your Lord, you miss 
him. Only your light touch of him, feeling after 
what he stood representative for, can appreciate him. 
Let me alone^ he says to those who would still hang 
upon him. This is not his peculiarity. Of all true 
regard for friend or fellow-creature, the proof is not 
gross demonstration but delicacy, penetrating through 
the outward form and bearing to what they mean and 
are missionaries of. When Montaigne says, " I offer 
myself faintly and bluntly to him whose I most effect- 
ually am," he puts a good understanding before 
any kiss or caress. To every ecclesiastical sentimen- 
talist Jesus gives this tonic : Live not for me, but the 
objects I live for ; love not me as you do the righteous 
will. Did God, in a phrase lately controverted, take 
*' an inferior man " for his instrument? This is su- 
preme manhood. Pick a flaw, who will, in the dia- 
mond, to which those are dirt that have just been 
discovered in South Africa ; find, if you can, cloud or 
stain in the pearl from the hand of the great Lapidary 
as he makes up his jewels. But this is indeed Milton's 
" human face divine." It is to reach the zenith, and 
touch the horizon of our utmost conception. 

Do I tempt to a more refined idolatry? Not in 



CHARACTER. 303 

denoting a virtue whose beauty is a bond. It were a 
stride for a self-worshipper to adore such a character, 
or even an image, a bit of painted cloth, flag, or em- 
blem ; any thing but the gaudy butterfly or golden calf 
he is ! When one expostulated with Mr. Thackeray 
for making young people talk so silly in his books, he 
said, "Nonsense ! you can't make them talk half silly 
enough ! " But, O flatterer of the Lord ! Jesus is too 
busy for your adulation. He does not wait to smell 
this everlasting smoke of your incense. Do not keep 
me, he says : and I must not detain you. My busi- 
ness is to forward these goods I am trusted with. 
Have I introduced you to God ? Let me stand aside. 
Engage in and enjoy the conversation. 

With that sublime soul, to put one's end above one's 
self, then, is the method of character. Do your work, 
and divert attention from your hand in it. The fine 
actor is lost in the personage he represents, the orator 
in the theme of his discourse, the singer in the melody 
he chants, the poet in the verse he writes, and every 
artist, builder, agent, in the business Heaven sends 
him on. What does Michel Angelo know of bend- 
ing his neck out of joint, painting the ceiling of the 
Sistine Chapel? What does John the Baptist resolve 
himself into but a voice in the wilderness? So Gar- 
rison did in the land slavery was making a worse 
desert. Why did John Brown think the sovereign 
State of Virginia and whole South no disproportionate 
antagonist, but that his cause was more than Union or 
nation? The best work everywhere is that of those 
absorbed in it, — like the silk-worm in the cocoon it 
weaves for its shroud ; the bee lost in the heart of the 



304 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

flower It sucks ; the coral insect, continent-builder, in 
the rocky reef. Self-oblivion is God's remembrance. 
The glass of admiring eyes Is a fragile preserver. 
Service of God in your kind is a safe w^hich the last 
fire w^ill not crumble. That is a Raphael, we say of 
the picture on the wall. Is Raphael In it at full 
length ? No : figures of others, — the Holy Family, 
angels that stoop, or cherubs that peep. That Is 
Beethoven ! It is an orchestra, playing his sympho- 
nies, till his bronze fades from your misty eyes. That 
is Shakspeare.. Yes, most hid when most revealed; 
less apparent In the self-referring sonnets than in the 
disinterested plays: all the dramah's personce hut the 
metes of his personality, a dwarf In the incidents of 
his biography, a seraph that soars and sings In his 
immortal lines. The locomotive Is splendid, speeding 
on its track ; but modestly slipping aside, its task done, 
unseen, to let its living load roll into the station, has a 
peculiar charm. In all Dr. Channlng's writings the 
sentence that always moved me most was that ending 
the Preface to his first volume. " In truth, I shall see 
with no emotion but joy these fugitive productions 
forgotten and lost In the superior brightness of writ- 
ings consecrated to the work of awakening in the 
human soul a consciousness of its divine and immortal 
powers." So Jesus says, Not me, but my pur- 
pose, my method, my direction, my affection for God 
and man, — in these my mission is fulfilled; the new 
Jerusalem has many avenues ; arrive at your station 
how you will ! 

But has not his character another side? What say 
of his conscious exaltation? his singular and un- 



CHARACTER. 305 

paralleled self-respect? We will say there is no self- 
interest ! It is all instrumentality. He is illustrator, 
and his word illustration, of something deeper. He 
would have us follow him, as we follow a demonstra- 
tion in geometry on the blackboard. Is it for the 
demonstrator's sake, or the truth's sake.'' It is what 
we follow to : as we follow a guide up the Alps or 
into the Adirondacks ; as we prospect for gold mines 
in California, — not for the guide, but for the view or 
the treasure ; as the Spaniards followed Cortez when 
he drew with his sword in the Mexican sands a line for 
the brave part of his army to cross, and cowards to go 
back. Such the only following Jesus asks, not to his 
honor, but the common weal. Follow him? We 
follow that in him which says, Touch me not^ — 
and, like those men of Galilee, gazing up after him 
into heaven, find ourselves in the infinite unseen, 
with him somehow still. Well for the simple and 
unlearned then or now to follow him ; but, when you 
follow truth and God, the personal following of him 
may cease. To those who knew not what to follow, 
he gave the command. " Have you experienced relig- 
ion ? " an unlettered woman of eighty was asked by the 
priest who would make a proselyte. " Yes, so far as 
I have practised it," was the reply. Such Jesus would 
have, not for followers, but peers ; not servants, but 
friends. 

But self-forgetfulness is not self-support. Jesus 
speaks of his glory he had before the world was. 
Is it not what we call the Ideal ? He had an elevator. 
As the stream runs into your house from a head of 
water, as the wheat yonder at the Western Railway 

20 



3o6 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

without stint flows down from a building raised 
high in air, so from what fathomless fund and store- 
house of thought his disinterestedness was drawn ! 
Why speculate so much? says the practical man. 
Why not go and do something, like the missionaries ? 
But, after the missionaries have sailed a thousand 
leagues and sacrificed themselves with homesickness, 
exposure, and hard fare, what is it for the Sandwich 
Islanders, and heathen in Hindostan, they do, but 
proclaim certain views? The views, then, are of some 
importance : what is every act but the offspring of a 
sentiment? To the critic, wondering we should beat 
and puzzle our brains over the problems of the uni- 
verse, we say. For every particle of pure truth, caught 
in pure vision or assayed from the crude ore of ac- 
cepted creeds, our meeting or meditation is not in 
vain, more than the enterprise of diggers in the 
California mines. My friend admitted the correctness 
of my essay, but justified the current opinion on the 
ground of the necessity of some alloy to prevent wear 
and make the truth pass. But alloy we can pick up 
plenty in the street. How if the supply of virgin gold 
fail? Why has the world not drained the Jewish 
Master dry, and spent long ago the last farthing of 
the Christian faith, but because of the immense Bank 
he leaned on, that honored his drafts? O my busy 
brother, God speed your benevolent plans ! But, to 
get along, we must have, not only the rolling stock, 
rails and driving wheels of some association or church 
order, but the locomotive power ; and he that gives 
us only more and better vapor, — call it mere breath 
if you will, steam from human lips, — is in place, and 



I 



CHARACTER. 307 

his word as good as any deed ! Has not what Jesus 
said, more than what he did, insured his longevity? 
What he said was no cut and dried scheme. He made 
it up, or it made itself, as he went along waiting upon 
God, holding Nature in solution in his mind, and 
putting character into every tone. In the conven- 
tional notion he is nothing but a Preceptor to his 
pupils, with the downward look. But what were 
his downward look without his upward one? He 
united his vision with sincerity, and was not double 
to different men, like those esoteric and exoteric clocks, 
on the outside and inside of railway stations, that 
never agree. He gre%v^ says Luke : did he ever get 
his growth ? That were the end of him ; stoppage 
of soul or body is certain death. Call the sexton, 
then, to make a grave for both! Do you not deny 
for him the very immortality Paul says he brought 
to light, when you disown his progress, and say he 
had exhausted God, though having all of him his 
flesh could contain ? Full of the element he floated 
in, how his capacity enlarged ! Treading the line of 
beauty, where did his feet find the end, or what proof 
is there it was enough for him to tread it for us, and 
not we for ourselves? I should as soon think of the 
iron filings drawn to a magnet, or bits of down to 
an electric jar, emptying the fluid that pervades the 
world, as of his or any sayings or doings expressing 
the whole creation's life, or Creator's peace and joy, 
to illustrate not substantiate which he came and 
taught. His was the Ideal method; but are we 
bound to his Ideal, could we exactly find it out? 
No, but to our own. There is justly no more than 



308 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

one. It belongs not to him, but to all, availed of in 
whatever diverse degree. For a ship, to be of the 
fleet, need not take the same way to the same port 
or fight, in an exact mathematical line after the flag- 
ship. We are in Christ's convoy so far as we sym- 
pathize in his style. His style in character, as well as 
in chronology, affects us still. 

Do not imitate him, we are told : deal at first hand 
with God. But God is no abstraction. We are part 
of him, and Jesus is part, in proportion to his worth. 
The society. State, church, household we live in, as 
well as stars that shine over us, are members of Deity, 
some hand or finger of God ; and by the laws of life 
we reach him over every causeway that is portion of 
himself. " I put myself," says our friend, " squarely 
outside of Christianity." That, were it psychologi- 
cally possible, were to be so far outside of God. We 
have a horror of examples ; but the worst one is that 
which we often in our prejudice set ourselves. We 
are inside of all human life. There is no such thing 
as a come-outer. Everybody, as one said of himself, 
is a stay-inner, and Christian in some sense. As the 
eye searches in the sky for the Pointers to find the 
North Star, so we see his traits in line with that 
pole of truth we too must steer by. However clouded, 
is it not in our firmament as big and steady as in his? 

" But an Ideal greater than he is, which we make 
for ourselves ! " exclaimed a good doctor of divinity, in 
surprise. No, we never made it, more than we did 
Orion or the Pleiads. God makes it ; he is it ! Purely 
individual we cannot be. In every man is the Ideal, 
greater than any man and all men, or Jesus himself. 



CHARACTER. oqq 

Such an Ideal had not Washington and Lincohi of 
a patriotism, which no details of service could expend, 
to make their names splendid myths of love of country 
when all the incidents and anecdotes shall be forgot? 
It is no accident. The human heart makes no mis- 
take, more than God. The selfish, blustering, bellig- 
erent demagogue of the hour, with whom God seems 
not to exist when he mentions him, can reach no such 
fame. Of all excellence this Ideal property is the 
span, the last touch and first breath. There is noth- 
ing so small or low it does not bend to, or bend to 
itself. ^ Which is the best picture, — that eked out 
every inch, as you have seen a cataract, mountain, 
iceberg, with a painstaking Chinese brush ; or that 
conceived, swept and played upon with some hu- 
manizing design, finding in form and color but its 
language and silent tongue? William Hunt never 
took his brush but with such intent. Which is the 
best orchestra, — that which renders every piece like 
a great music-box, or that which turns pipe and string 
to such expression as to bear you like a wind to some 
heavenly shore? " It is too much sail to carry," said 
one at a pathetic performance. " It means," replied 
another, " you shall carry sail somewhere else." Who 
is the best speaker, — he that grinds or saws out with 
set teeth his sentences, or he that transpires what he 
is inspired with ? Who accomplishes most anywise, — 
he that goes doggedly to work, as the Esquimaux make 
their dogs draw their sleds over ice and snow, or he 
that opens his faculties to be blown upon from above 
and plants them in the river of God, — as the miller 
makes breeze and water-fall turn his vans and wheels 
to more account than by any crank under his hands? 



3IO RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

This vision is not for show, like gilt pipes on the 
old organs. In nothing is such use. The Indian had 
it when he praised a United States President, and 
pronounced him polite, for turning his back so as not 
to see how much his guest ate or drank. So in our 
war had the wounded soldier, with a bleeding mouth 
and burning thirst, refusing the officer's canteen lest 
with his blood he should hurt it for the other men. 
When Putnam, going to the Potomac, said, " Mother, 
it is easy to give life, terrible to take it," he bore 
the glory of Christ's lowly boast under his lieutenant's 
belt. The man had it who took me up on the windy 
road, and apologized for the little room in his chaise. 
Our friend had it when he said, not " go but come to 
the war." The Pilgrims had it when those staying 
behind wondered what such fools were thinking of; 
and they made us color-bearers of their idea, alive 
not to drop what will glorify us when we die. The 
savages in Central Africa, says a late traveller, still 
prick the image of the cross into their own skins, and 
weave it into their saddles. Do we not learn from our 
Fathers to abjure showy emblems for humane suffer- 
ings and deeds? 

Action from spiritual perception, to form character, 
must complete the proof. When the English collier, 
in his bucket with the broken rope, cries, " From un- 
der I ^^ to those at the bottom of the shaft; when the 
French soldier begs the surgeon to keep his ether for 
those worse wounded, and stuffs his bloody handker- 
chief into his mouth to bear without noise the unrelieved 
knife ; when the fallen dying acrobat sings out, " Look 
after those girls on the trapeze ; " when the conductor 



CHARACTER. 3II 

runs forward on the track to save a little child, and 
clears the stroke of the engine by a single foot ; when 
the engineer sticks to his locomotive rushing to ruin 
like Cooper's boatswain going down with the Ariel^ — 
of something more than mortal there is proof. Can you 
renounce the life you desire, turn your back on the 
heaven you conceive, — willing, as said Dr. Hopkins, 
to be damned for the glory of God, or like Paul to be 
a cast-away, accursed for your kind? Do you consent 
to be annihilated if that be best? You have what 
you give up ! Relinquishment is possession, and 
death your mortgage on life. " I refuse not to die," 
said Paul to Festus. How kill what said that? 

It is I, but not mine ; it is you, but not yours. God 
can take care of his property ! Calvin's God is Saturn 
over again devouring his own children. Love is ex- 
ecutor of Law. These two have no mediator but 
whatever as momentary priest puts them in imme- 
diate relation, to pronounce them one. A Boston 
minister says, " What weight in the Sermon on the 
Mount from the authority of Him that said it ! " Indeed, 
is the sermon true because he said it ; or did he say it 
because it was true? Does authority or inspiration 
make truth ; or does truth make authority and inspira- 
tion? "The mistake is," says the same minister, "to 
set truth before Christ." Then he made that mistake ; 
for he set the truth he was but part of before himself. 
The worst sign of the times is this putting of what 
Webster, replying to Hayne, calls " mutual quota- 
tion and commendation," in place of free inquiry, in 
our religious press. 

" Touch me not ! " We cannot touch him till we 



312 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

are transparent with goodness like him. Our Lord? 
He is the beggar whom the seeker of the Holy Grail 
shares his crust with, be he German or French ; as 
he was the child Christopher bore over the stream. 
When one proposed in convention to resolve Chris- 
tianity into love to God and man, it was objected, this 
is the end to which Christianity is the means. But 
as we learn to vote by voting, walk by walking, and 
to swim by swimming ; as in the race or regatta the 
starting-point is to the rounding boat also the goal, — 
so I know no way to love God and man but by loving 
them. 

We object to calling Christ a man, as if to be such 
were mean : " A poor thing," said the poet Daniels, 
" unless above himself he can erect himself." Christ's 
character is a flower human nature could not bloom 
into, and a fruit that never grew on the family tree ! 
Which does this doctrine decry, mankind or its au- 
thor? Have we ascertained the capacity of the soul, 
as we measure the cubic contents of a ship or pun- 
cheon? Do we know what is coming out of it before 
the time? Who predicted Homer, Shakespeare, 
Raphael ! We are told of ghosts so substantial as to 
have their photographs taken ; but no portraits of 
such as have never existed or been embodied. Those 
who maintain that Jesus, without human father, was 
begotten of the Holy Ghost, do not deny he had all 
the parts and properties of a man. Had any organ, 
faculty, affection, been vs^anting, he would have been 
a monster, and every moment of his life, each breath 
he drew, a new miracle. Had he shown any virtue 
beyond others' reach to practise, it would equally defy 



CHARACTER. 



313 



their ability to admire or understand. Your praise is 
your potential possession of any excellence, in intellect 
or morals, in science or art, music, painting, poetry, 
or eloquent speech. Were it not latent in us as a 
susceptibility which culture might unfold into accom- 
plishment, we could not have the glow of one heart- 
beat of delight in it. We could not shout at the 
oration, clap in the concert-room, or say Amen to the 
prayer. Do I know what it was for Jesus to hang on 
the cross, or drop the bloody sweat in the garden? 
Then I could have agonized and hung there. The 
stupid crowd that throw up their caps with one gen- 
uine throb of gratitude or cordial cheer of applause, 
as the hero or deliverer passes by, could every one have 
dared or suffered as much as Grant at Richmond, or 
Washington at Valley Forge. Did twenty millions 
of men compose the funeral procession when Lin- 
coln's body was borne across the States to the tomb ? 
Every sincere mourner had in him the germ of the 
great President's martyrdom. Not a trait of the mas- 
ter but is a copy of the disciple's latent worth. Noth- 
ing actual in Jesus that is not possible in you and in 
the feeblest babe in the crib. 

It is not only incorrect, but injurious, to shut off 
from the common soul any merit, or say it can only 
be imputed or imparted, never indigenous ; as if good- 
ness were not nativ^e to the mind, but only immigrant 
or an import. Superhuman is it? Then certainly I 
shall not try for it ! Why should a man strain after 
something beyond his manhood? '•'' Stopl Stop!" 
cried a lad with his carpet-bag to a railway train 
gliding from the station. I might as well try to arrest 



314 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

qualities I cannot emulate. " What is the use of his 
running?" said a fellow-passenger to me of a person 
who expected to overtake the cars getting full under- 
way. We do not want an unattainable standard held 
up before us. It would be insult to our will, mockery 
of our weakness, discouragement of our hope. Arch- 
angelic displays, by a being different in kind from us, 
would but tantalize and torment. 

But I challenge this peculiar superiority of tradi- 
tional and historic virtue. The preacher describes 
the transcendent truth, love, meekness, conscience, 
self-sacrifice, and says it is no use to attempt : you 
cannot be as good as that. It can be passed over to 
your credit if you believe in the atonement ; but can- 
not, save by favor of the pleading and dying Advocate, 
be really your own. Every honest drop of blood 
resents this fiction of the court, which theologians 
fancy for their forensic God, and tingles with the 
assertion that it too can flow with sincerity or flow 
out an offering to any worthy cause ; as it did ten 
years ago, to drench the land it saved, — not boastful 
blood, though claiming the right to give itself, and 
running so freely ! What strikes us in these empty- 
sleeved, scarred men, is their making so little of what 
they did or endured in their wilderness on the Poto- 
mac, or Gethsemane of the Mississippi ; their silence, 
abstinence from profession, having to be drawn out to 
speak of the scenes they passed through, and using the 
lowest terms in their description, the farthest from 
travellers' tales, and regarding all as within the line of 
simple duty. What sin mixed with their holocaust.'* 
Always so in tasks and trials that are sublime. 



CHARACTER. 315 

I do not disparage past example, or dishonor the 
holy biography, in saying it is matched by pi'esent 
worth. Why do I declare what I have sometimes 
the privilege to see, in living and dying men and 
women, is equal to any sacred tale? Because I can 
conceive nothing better than I behold. A woman, 
listening many years ago to a famous sermon, said, 
" That is as good as Christ." " Oh no ! rather good 
as anti-Christ," said her friend. But what is indeed 
Christian is as good as Christ ; for it is the same thing 
of divine inspiration. He would have said he was 
not a Christian himself! If you question the supreme 
worth of that patience, resignation, fearless departure, 
or self-consuming devotion, which you witness to-day, 
you confound with doubt the very glory and identical 
element in the Saviour of the world. To be shocked 
at its appearance in or ascription to another, is to suspect 
it in him, and disbelieve it altogether. It is infidelity ! 
Was the light, air, water, in Judasa better than ours.f* 
Had love, truth, purity, superior preciousness then? 
Wonderful, Jesus forgave his foes ! Cannot you ? If 
I feel I cannot afford to have an enemy, if strife is no 
luxury to me, if I must love and help my adversary, 
why tell me to find a better disposition in Canaan 
two thousand years ago ? The earth may be between 
me and Jesus ; I tread the ashes of fifty generations 
fallen on his grave ; but there is no thought betwixt 
us, no misunderstanding ; the ideas are common ; we 
occupy the same celestial globe. 

But do you not make a mere man of him ? Not 
at all ; there is no such thing as a mere man ! I 
never knew one any way or where. Tou are not 



3l6 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

a mere man, but fashioned in the Maker's image. 
If species are diverse, none absokitely distinct ; all 
kinds in God's creation run into each other without 
boundary or bar. Mere man? There is no mere 
animal, without something human. There is no mere 
vegetable. The sponge drinks, the fly-catcher is a 
flower that catches insects, the orchids grotesquely 
mimic our fancies, the sensitive plant has nerves. 
There is no mere mineral. The rock is not solid nor 
at rest, but appears a whirl of atoms ready for trans- 
formation into regularity of higher rhythm which is 
life. The rock in me is resolution : I got my will 
out of the cliffs that overhung my father's house. 
God is my Rock, higher than I. Your companion 
deceased, you see in heaven. Was he a mere man 
on earth .f* Then how did he get up there, without 
ladder or wings, or Tower of Babel, to climb by? 
My dear friend Ephraim Peabody appeared to me 
in a dream at the top of a hill lofty and steep as that 
peculiar one I clambered up two thousand feet at 
Dixville Notch ; and he said, " Come up." " I can- 
not ! " " Yes, you can ; " and, buoyed by some strange 
force that seized me, I rose to him as in a balloon. 
But our rising to the seraph is no airy ascent. It is 
getting out of one sort of nature, the human, into 
another sort, the seraphic. It is not travelling, going 
so many miles into space ; but transmutation, impos- 
sible if we were mere men. You say of your dear 
partner. She is an angel. You see half-open the 
spiritual pinions she will soar on. In every hour of 
aspiration, we are conscious of forces not yet in use, 
ready to uplift. 



CHARACTER. 



317 



So when you talk of the simple humanity of Jesus, 
my Unitarian brother or Humanitarian believer, I 
must tell you, You cannot part man from God, and 
keep the man. He would bleed to death ; his man- 
hood would perish. Jesus is of no other order nor 
a class all by himself, but the supreme instance thus 
far, in the verdict of history, of this common life with 
Deity. 

But, if we classify him with all the rest, where is his 
honor, and what accounts for his place, pre-eminence, 
and unrivalled influence? I answer, The idea he 
stands for, of the Divine Humanity. This is the signal 
he hoists. No signal-tender on the long road of our 
race ever lifted one so high. Before him God was 
outside, in the sky, among the elements, on a throne. 
He was the Thunderer at Sinai, the Dropper of manna 
in the desert, the Divider of the Red Sea. Men did 
not dare to bring him down and domesticate him in 
their own breasts. He was in some pew, easier to 
get at in Jerusalem or Gerizim, till Jesus showed him 
universal Spirit, whom neither Jew nor Samaritan 
could own, but every gentile and barbarian shared. 
He delivered God from keepers, and made the connec- 
tion of trains we are all passengers in. He is God- 
man ; and I hold it as unjust as ungrateful to dispute 
this claim. It is no individual assumption. He is 
our conductor ; but will not follow us round the streets 
after we arrive ! He is the representative man. He 
no more wishes to have dignity to himself than mo- 
nopolize bread or heaven. " A white man's govern- 
ment ! " said Frederic Douglass ; " as well talk of a 
white man's sun or moon ! " Sonship of Christ alone 



3l8 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

with God were a worse exclusiveness. In whatever 
he said of himself, he published the common privilege. 
Son of God was he as well as Son of man? Who is 
not? There are no two natures: the human is divine. 

But the Word became flesh ! In that single instance 
wholly and only? Is the Divinity an absentee from 
your frame? Is Satan inmate of your flesh, and every 
ill demon a birthright tenant of your babe? Then, 
O Orthodox brother ! if anybody is totally depraved, 
it is you in having the babe. You have no business 
with it ! Wedlock is sin, the marriage vow is blas- 
phemy, love is shame, the infant you hail the advent 
of is your dumb accuser, and the nest of the cocka- 
trice or serpent's den is a harmless thing, to be spared 
till you have broken up your cradle. Else we are all 
partakers of the incarnation. Something of the reason 
of the All-wise, love of the All-good, sanctity of the All- 
pure, is embodied as inspired in us and our offspring. 

But he is the Mediator between God and man ! Yet 
he was a man. So this is a function not confined to 
any, but belonging in some measure to every man. 
The mediation between God and man goes on in 
every bosom. In the electrical toy, called Dives and 
Lazarus, a pendulum plays betwixt the full and empty 
jar, and the fluid passes all the time. What is that 
agent you are all acquainted with, ever going to and 
fro between the Divinity and the humanity, to move 
and check, guide and warn, cleanse and correct, 
remove the dry rot of folly and vice, build and rebuild 
of the sound timber of righteousness the inner fane ? 
It is the mediator between God and man in the hu- 
man soul. Everybody that knows himself knows this 



CHARACTER. 



319 



Other self, — third party or person of the inward 
Trinity, day's man between us and God, operator 
whose telegraph cannot be bought up and never lies, 
ambassador that will take no bribe, plenipotentiary 
whose business is not to dissolve the personality, which 
it makes ever more divine. This incorruptible go- 
between reproves my coming short, will not let me 
prevaricate, has a lash for my vice sharper than the 
whip of scorpions, and imprisons me for staining my 
brother's name or sister's honor in a dungeon darker 
than that to which criminals against the State are sent. 
There are those who can distinguish this agent in them, 
as they discriminate between their body and soul. 
They feel something not dependent on clay, but ade- 
quate to finer form or organization. Such as reach not, 
or distrust, this spirituality, Jesus serves as the ap- 
parition of God, a visible Holy Ghost. This is the 
secret of his hold ; the millions he has performed 
this function for, and will still for whoever finds not 
that heavenly factor he calls the Comforter, the some- 
thing better than himself he promised. To be his, 
and sit at his table, is to partake his vision of God and 
immortality. Eating and drinking a little bread and 
wine cannot make you one with him, unless you eat 
his flesh and drink his blood, fed and stimulated with 
his sense of eternal life. 

This is the question of the world's unbelieving wis- 
dom : Was Jesus aught but a credulous enthusiast, in 
declaring an endless career? Show just where the 
credulity lies ! The Christian believes man is not an 
ephemeral creature, that his soul is older than and will 
outlast his flesh ; and you, O sceptic ! believe it is but 



320 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

a transient property of his material composition, which 
his birth lighted, and to which Death will say, " Out^ 
brief candle ! " You believe all these thoughts and hopes 
and plans and feelings can but, with the ashes they 
crumble into, line the tomb whose marble letters will be 
a longer decoration ; and, after the funeral procession 
and the sexton's spade, not an idea or sentiment, that 
once illumined and inflamed the mortal shape, shall 
dare to " mutter or peep." Once dead, you think 
you " will not be able to pick yourself up," and there 
will be nobody to pick you out of the dust. Well, 
in this comparison between the man of Nazareth and 
yourself, his critic, the credulity is not his but yours ! 
You bring the strain on faith. You are believing a 
great deal, what is unbelievable, that death is anni- 
hilation, extinction of love, and disappointment of 
hope. You believe that God deceives the expectations 
he inspires, breaks his word, plays false with his 
child, and is a person wanting veracity, on whom we 
cannot rely. You believe the claim of the heart on 
its objects, though it is constituted never to give them 
up, is less valid than that to a farm or beach, or piece 
of goods, or wild land in Kansas or Oregon, or field 
or mine in Australia or California. That is a claim; 
but the soul has none, no title. There is no deed 
drawn up for it. Its talk about other mansions and 
plains is mere pretence, delusion, impotent attempt 
at usurpation. As between you and him you reject 
my mind is made up. I go with the Galilean ! My 
faith compasses more with him ; but it would be 
stretched more with you. When report came of a 
painless operation in mesmeric sleep, a doctor said 



CHARACTER. 



321 



he would swallow no such camel as that. " Well," 
replied the surgeon, " in believing we were all mis- 
taken, and the poor sailor here, whose limb I cut off, 
is a false witness, you take down a dromedary, a 
camel with two humps, with perfect ease." 

Is the joy of Christ's faith no proof? He did not 
argue the matter. Much argument confounds the 
instinct. " The more I reason about it," said one to me, 
" the less I believe." The silent dropping by friends of 
flowers and tears together on the coffin hinted imme- 
diately more than the loud voice of the priest pro- 
claiming the resurrection of the body. Surely as fell 
the blossoms and the holy water they shook from their 
eyes to keep them alive a little longer, the soul had 
risen to Him who turns all blooming into the language 
of his love to us, as of ours to each other. He can 
make his chariot of these delicate leaves of the open- 
ihg buds as well as of the mighty clouds that go 
sounding through the sky with their rattling wheels ; 
and of the same soft vehicle that takes him to us a 
vessel, on the return journey, to bear us back. Mean- 
time we weep. But, with upward-looking eye, — 

" The tear, that to the earth descends, 
Belongs of right to the earth ; 
To its home above the soul ascends. 
Where it had its heavenly birth." 

This is no calculation ; it is testimony. The act or 
word that sets the world forward is always inspired. 
Calculation is unbelief. " He looks like a fox," said 
one of the portrait of a man. " That is what he is," 
was the artist's reply. Luther's Here I standi I can- 
not otherwise^ shows the God-driven man, as the 

21 



322 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. Let such 
a man have credit, w^hatever he says ! Let him 
say / as he will : it is no egotism, but God in the 
world. Avoid the personal pronoun as the self- 
seeker may, he has no humility nor faith. What I 
think, believe, hope, love, and sacrifice my lower self 
to, differs from what I covet, lust after, indulge in, 
am proud of, sell or forswear myself for. The self- 
allusion of the man who carries a mirror of vanity to 
pulpit or platform, to look at himself in his discourse, 
is not the same with that of him who makes it the 
emphasis of truth and duty and the presence of the 
Deity. This selfhood was Christ's crown. M. 
Renan intimates a sentimental relation between Jesus 
and the women. But his repulse of the one with 
whom he was on the most tender terms, when she 
rushed to salute him, saying, " Hands off; touch me 
not ; go to the disciples, and worship the common 
Father," shows a deeper secret in his character than 
the French biographer found. While we are so fond 
of him as to fall short of his centre, we continue the 
offence he rebuked. We are not with him till we 
have gone beyond. 



XIV. 

GENIUS: FATHER TAYLOR. 

TN the year 1833, being a student in the Divinity 
-*■ School in Cambridge, and learning that a Bethel 
for Seamen was to be dedicated in Boston, withal 
catching a rumor in the air of some peculiar gift in 
the preacher, I walked in to North Square. As soon 
as I entered the new brick building, so famous as a 
sailors' harbor to all the world, and the master of 
ceremonies appeared, I felt he was such a one as 
I had never seen before in the shape of minister 
or man. It was no decorous individual sitting si- 
lent and solemn in the pulpit-corner till the people 
were all assembled, and it was time for the ser- 
vices to begin; but a figure of restless and uncon- 
tainable life, which no box of a pulpit seemed able to 
hold. The chafing in such close quarters, the glance 
that reached every point and seemed to fall on every 
body, the swift step from side to side of the desk, the 
radiant look, the voice strong and mellow as thunder 
or a breaking wave, the gesture (whose lively expres- 
sion could not have been bettered by Kemble or Booth), 
with which, saying, "My pulpit has no doors," he 
beckoned up such as could not find seats below, and 



324 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

the white heat of enthusiasm which seemed no excite- 
ment, but a normal state, — proved that no pompous 
ecclesiastic, droning parson, or strait-laced bigot was to 
discourse that day and be primate and bishop of that 
establishment. Last summer I was again in the same 
place. The human form, so long aflame with zeal 
at its busy task, lay quiet enough at last. The con- 
trast between life and death was never so great. My 
friend had fallen into the sleep to which the sweetest 
slumber known before is uneasiness. 

This new hand indeed at the bellows, forging human 
welfare, ought not to vanish without some memorial. 
In all praise is a certain disrespect ; yet such a duty 
lies in the desire to speak, the presumption may have 
pardon. No American citizen, lawyer, scholar, or 
statesman made an impression so unique, or left repu- 
tation more solid. Webster, Clay, Lincoln, Calhoun, 
by no advantage of stormy debate or political promi- 
nence, printed their names deeper on their time than 
this Methodist, whose method transcending limits of 
sect was all his own. How did a poor clergyman, 
never leaving his own little spot, haunting with comfort 
and rebuke of love the vilest part of the city, — beside 
his boys, as were those on every quarter-deck or before 
the mast, — draw all men unto him ? In the hall of 
memory, what service puts his spiritual statue for ever 
in its own niche ? Let us try to learn, lest without 
record of biography or autobiography the name of 
Taylor be scarce more than a tradition. 

He belonged to no class. He was not, for any 
system of theology or philosophy, either leader or led. 
He will be identified with no dogma or reform other 



GENIUS : FATHER TAYLOR. 325 

or less than of the way of regarding and treating 
those whom he served. He is the sailor's representa- 
tive. Those other great ones were landsmen. He 
stands for the sea. He is the great delegate from the 
waves to the congress of intellect. In thousands of 
ships, by almost millions of mariners, to whom by 
baptism of the Holy Ghost he was father who chris- 
tened their babes, his fame was borne to every port. 
The sailor says he has been where the United States 
had not been heard of, but never where Father Taylor 
had not. How did a man, — no discoverer in the 
kingdom of ideas, no martyr of principle, nor marshal 
of opinion, — so touch the common mind? The an- 
swer is that word about whose application we are 
always in quarrel or doubt, — genhis. It is a large 
w^ord. It signifies a universal quality. It is an office 
and warrant to speak to or act on people of every sort, 
to span every social gulf, and bring all who differ or 
are opposed into one mind. Such was his gift. As 
the people say, he was a gifted man, perhaps the only 
one of his generation among us to whom the term 
genius absolutely belongs. May I show this by some 
enumeration of marks? 

First, genius possesses a man. Others have been 
as intuitive as he, with perceptions as clear and judg- 
ment more harmonious, holding the glass steadier to 
spiritual things, weighing values of thought more 
coolly, analyzing subjects more keenly as in a mental 
spectroscope, detecting correspondences more exactly 
with the wide-open eye of imagination, and with 
more masterly combining of old elements into new 
maxims or Ideas. But who has been with the truth 



326 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

SO taken and carried away ? His vision was passion. 
It made a train of his faculties. His insight was en- 
actment. It was said of one, " In company he leaves 
the scholar behind : in his study he is a different man." 
Taylor never left nor lost himself, nor seemed made 
up of parts and pieces. He moved altogether if he 
moved at all. His casual talk was better than any 
preparation ; his impromptu, his finest performance. 
A gown would have " wrapped his talent in a napkin." 
He put on no dress nor garland. He was as inspired 
at the street-corner as addressing a throng. There 
was grandeur in his trivial converse, and humor in his 
grave discourse. He provoked laughter in the con- 
gregation, and wet your eyes with his private greet- 
ing ; put you in church with his grace at table, 
made an April day of smiles and tears at his evening 
vestry, or overcame you with solemnity in your house, 
so that you were inclined to say it thundered, or an 
angel spake to him. One said he was like a cannon, 
better on the Common than in a parlor. But in your 
sitting-room he could be a flute. He was a man-pf- 
war, or tender and soft as a maid. In accidental en- 
counters he melted hard-faced persons with his pathos, 
or surprised the despondent into good cheer with con- 
solations effectual because before undreamed. In all 
this was no calculation. As the Spiritualists say, he 
was under control. He was an Italian improvisator 
in America, an extemporaneous speaker condensed 
beyond example, with combustion and no dilution. 
In many a wit we see the diamond shining : he w^as 
the diamond burning. " Do not get worn out," a 
friend said to him. " I tear out," was his reply. He 



* GENIUS : FATHER TAYLOK. 327 

served some strange power, having its v\ray with him, 
and v^^hich he could not resist. The spirit of this 
prophet w^as not subject to the prophet. 

After possession the second mark of genius \^ facil- 
ity. There was in Taylor infinite ease. His display 
of power cost him no more effort than for the sea to 
roll or the wind to blow. It would but have been 
hard to resist his influx and inspiration. Never aught 
violent or rough. To storm or scream is the false 
note, — counterfeit that passes current with many. 
When a speaker raises his voice, and aggravates to 
fury his manner, we say. It is all true, and I agree 
with you ; but do not cave in my head ! Some orators 
and readers collar us like a sheriff, or worry us like a 
terrier-dog. They are ruffians with our minds. But 
this man's persuasive magnetism drew us without inter- 
ference of our will or his own. He had at his mercy 
alike our pocket and our heart. Yet this gracious 
respect had in it no weak gushing, nor the smallest 
leak. If he ever boiled, he never slopped over ; like 
George Washington, whose temper was a caldron, if 
not an awkwardly lifted pail. He carried no looking- 
glass of self-admiration or mutual admiration. His ex- 
travagance was elevation. His glowing commendation 
of the men and women, his fellow-laborers, was like 
the lustre with which the sun flatters the mountain-tops. 
His approach was no defiance or assault ; but he 
always accepted a challenge with courage that was 
courtesy in the duel from which he never ran. He 
was nothing if not spontaneous. His originality was 
never insolence, like that of Mr. Brownson, who told 
his audience their resentment of his doctrine proved 
its truth. 



328 RADICAL PROBLEMS. • 

The third mark of genius is communication. In 
Taylor this was perfect. " Her very foot speaks," 
says Shakespeare. But in most persons not a tithe of 
the frame bears witness. His marvellous suppleness 
of fibre and organ made his whole body a tongue. 
When the ballet-girls came out in the theatre and 
commenced their astounding pirouettes, he, sitting on 
the front row, turned round to the spectators with a 
look that diverted the house from the spectacle and 
outdid all the mimicries of the stage. He was as 
ingrained an actor as Garrick or Kean. He did not 
believe in preaching from notes ; and, making a speech 
at a meeting of his brethren, he took off a clergyman 
confined to his manuscript, looking from his page 
to his hearers, gazing one way and gesticulating an- 
other, to the convulsive laughter of the victims he 
scored. I remember his impersonating a dervish in 
his spinning raptures, so that to see that Oriental 
character one had no need to travel. There was in 
his word a primitive force none could withstand. 
" Move a little : accommodation is a part of religion," 
he said to some who took up too much room in a 
crowded seat; and, as though his request were a favor, 
and in such quaint phrase they had received a pres- 
ent, they moved. Every subject was to him such an 
object^ he marvelled at our philosophic self-fingering. 
" Height of the sky ! " said William Blake ; " non- 
sense ! see, I touch it with my stick." Taylor's thought 
touched heaven. At eight years old he went through 
all the motions of the minister's service, not stopping 
with sermon and prayer. He must also have funerals. 
But how get the bodies? By shying stones at chick- 



GENIUS : FATHER TAYLOR. 329 

ens, and having obsequies over their remains. When 
the supply failed, or perhaps, for the cruelty, his heart 
misgave him, the little resurrectionist dug up the bod- 
ies for a second performance. Mourners, too, w^ere 
necessary ; and that office he required the negro chil- 
dren on the place to fill. If words would not move 
the lazy things, he whipped them into the traces of his 
machine of grief. His acting was no illusion or trick, 
but perfect nature, and so perfect art. He could not, 
like Delsarte, have picked out the muscle to express 
heaven or hell. How he did it he knew not. Great 
orators have studied their motions in a glass. But, if 
he ever saw his own face for a moment, he must have 
straightway forgotten what manner of man he was. 
Never was a less self-conscious countenance, — more 
ignorant of its own looks. The Cape-Ann farmer 
said Rufus Choate could cant his countenance so as to 
fetch tears out of you in two minutes. But there was 
no canting in Taylor. 

Of true genius sympathy is a mark. In him it was 
raised to the highest power. He not only saw into 
people, but out of them, or saw as they did from their 
centre ; and for his eye-glasses put on their eyes. His 
word grew out of the occasion : his feeling was gener- 
ated on the spot. His thought fell like an aerolite, 
and did not crystallize like a gem. Dr. Channing had 
views: he had visions. He preached as the birds 
sang. He could not help it or help himself. Where 
he stood was a drama, not a desk. He was the char- 
acter in " Midsummer-Night's Dream : " it mattered 
not what part he took. Riches dropped from him una- 
wares, like pearls from Prince Esterhazy's dress. His 



330 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

concern was wide as his race. Genius is love. Was 
Byron misanthrope ? So far no poet. Taylor was no 
cold peak. His mountain stood on fire. His was a 
southern heart married to a northern brain. He went 
back to Virginia, and asked to see Johnny, the little 
boy he had played with at school fifty years before, 
and they -brought in a white-haired old man; and 
Taylor came home and represented lad and gray- 
beard with his marvellous transformations, needing 
no stage-dress. He entered into every nature ; with 
the Dutch painter could have become a sheep, and 
seemed only a larger one among the pigeons that 
swarmed round him in his back-yard to be fed. As 
he walked in the Public Garden, a sparrow flew 
startled from its bush. He stretched his hand after it, 
saying, " I will not squeeze you." For a moment I 
thought the bird might come. 

In his illustration of genius, liberality was a mark. 
A Methodist, Methodism was not his gaol or goal. 
Like the Indian on the prairie, he said he walked 
large. . He knocked at every door, Orthodox, Episco- 
pal, Romish, Radical ; and, as in the Arabian Nights' 
tale, every door opened. He had the freedom of the 
city. Thirty years ago he attended a meeting of the 
Transcendental Club. There were in the company, as 
he entered, doubtful looks ! He was asked to speak, 
and began in his chair; but soon saying, "I must get 
up," he rose, rubbed the rumples out of his trowsers 
with a laugh, and pictured our climbing like spiders 
with such vivacity that when, as he concluded, another 
ventured to speak, our leader said, " When the spirit 
has orbed itself in a man, there is nothing more to 



genius: father taylor. 331 

offer." Who shall come after the king? Pentecost 
was repeated, and we were full of new wine. He was 
not humorous, but humor. He compared polemics to 
two bands of turtles he had seen march on a ship's 
deck, stretching out their necks to each other, till 
from those that got their heads uppermost the other 
party beat a retreat. The turtles would have been 
content with their representative. To some Liberals, 
denouncing the notion of hell-fire, he lifted thumb and 
finger to his nostrils, and said, " We all have a senti- 
mentality of that sulphur." No close communion for 
him ! He appraised others beyond their merits. His 
liberality was worth something, making him ready to 
do battle with intolerance. In his large toleration he 
was a Radical, in his own order born before the time. 
" Are you cheating the Unitarians, or are the Unita- 
rians cheating you?" asked Dr. Beecher. "Doctor, 
a third party has come in that wants to have all the 
cheating to itself," answered the edge-tool the veteran 
attempted to handle. He, that had been in the Span- 
ish cruiser from New Orleans, and the American 
privateer Curlew from Boston, was a born soldier, 
and knew how to carry arms. 

Boldness is a mark of genius. He hated Spiritual- 
ism, and claimed to be an exerciser. " The spirits 
never can do any thing after I come," he said : " they all 
run away." His deck was always cleared for action. 
When the clergy of the Methodist circuit were dis- 
paraged by a Unitarian as worth no more than the 
small salary they were paid, how his battery blazed ! 
" I will set them foot to foot against any of you, with a 
Bible in one hand and a wilderness of human souls 



332 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

before them ! '* He bade a boastful British officer 
remember we had whipped England. " What credit 
to whip your mother?" growled the commodore. 
" Not much," answered Taylor ; " and I promise you 
we will never whip the old lady again unless she gives 
us very particular occasion." His repartees were droll 
enough for harlequin with their grotesque style, but 
always had earnest meaning. A young man having 
upset the Bible, and stooping for it in his desk, 
" Never mind," says Taylor ; " I can put it up next 
Sunday." How he strode up and down, patting the 
book he loved, as if it were alive ! " How long 
shall we compass this Jericho ? " he cried at a revival 
meeting in the vestry of the West Church. I sug- 
gested our conversion was not finished, and we 
needed still food of humility more than the mince-pie 
of praise. He left us hurt and hot. The next time I 
met him, he embraced and kissed me in the street. 
He was a placable enthusiast, charitable devotee, 
fanatic but for his love. Entering a Boston church, 
one said, " This seems so entirely dedicated to God as 
to leave no room for man." There was always room 
for man where Taylor was. How audacious to ex- 
plode conventionalities ! Arguing with him about 
perfection, I asked if anybody had been as good as 
Jesus. " Millions," he replied ; an answer which, 
against my testimony. Unitarians and Methodists dis- 
credit and try to explain away. Of a great Rationalist 
he said, " There is a screw loose somewhere ; but I 
have laid my ear close to his heart, and have never 
been able to detect any jar in the machinery. He 
must go to heaven ; for Satan would not know what 



GENIUS : FATHER TAYLOR. 333 

to do with him if he got him. Give the devil his 
rations, it will change the climate, and the emigration 
will be that way ! " Of Transcendentalism he said, 
" It is like a gull : long wings, lean body, poor feathers, 
and miserable meat." " Too far off: the Kind's busi- 
ness requires haste," he would tell the dull speaker 
at his conference. His speech was seldom bitter or 
biting, however sometimes wounding, it being to him 
sacrilege to keep it back. His censure was a frigate's 
broadside or a lion's roar ; his praise was a medal, a 
badge, or the freedom of the city in a gold box, the 
terms were so solid and precious in which it was put. 
He named the sailor-talkers, — one, " pure Hebrew ; " 
another, " North of Europe ; " a third, " Salvation set 
to music." But for the iron in his blood, and the 
gauntlet on his hand, he would have been a spiritual 
glue, a mere sympathy, a dissipated mind. 

Beauty is a mark of genius. Of the poor old 
ministers he said, " They should be fed on preserved 
diamonds. They are camels in the desert, bearing 
precious treasures and browsing on bitter herbs." 
The charm of his manners who, this side the Orient, 
could match.? At a distance, seeing you afar off, 
he would touch his heart, his forehead, and his lips 
with a salute that seemed too much for aught below 
angels or less than the universe. His love was as the 
sea ; but never billow lapped the beach more softly 
than his affection touched its object. His untaught 
courtesy, the delicacy of demonstrativeness, was con- 
spicuous in his treatment of the other sex. The show 
was a drop to the gulf behind. He felt the truth, that 
no man is indebted to any other so much as to some 



334 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

woman. His purity was not ice, but flame. His 
bearing was royal, and made every woman a queen. 
No calamity could extinguish his cheer in the church 
or by the way. At the funeral of the woman whom 
he said he should claim and could not spare in hea- 
ven, he leaned his shining face out of the carriage, 
and astonished the conventional gloom by greet- 
ing people on the way. " You do not know that 
old Irishwoman," one of the family said, trying to 
put on him some decent restraint. " Why shouldn't 
she have her share ? " was his retort. He and Miss 
Sedgwick once met suddenly in the middle of the 
room. "Did you mean to kiss me?" she cried, start- 
ing back. " I only know," he answered, " I got 
mine." 

Veracity is a mark of genius ; and that is a false 
notion which makes it consist in any exaggeration, 
which Dr. Johnson said all eloquence is. There is in 
it no distortion or high color. It is true to Nature, 
low and neutral when she is ; and Taylor was a piece 
of Nature hewn out of her rock. He was autochthon 
as well as, and before he was, seraph. It was said of 
Daniel Webster he gravitated to the truth, and could 
not argue a bad case comparatively well, — as we 
had melancholy proof. Was it southern blood or 
sensitiveness to the agitators' faults that hindered his 
rank on the roll of any reform, save of the common 
opinion and treatment of his dear sailors ? One trait 
of genius we might say he lacked, — foresight. 
He was no prophet of freedom, of unacknowledged 
rights, or the fine arts. It was wonderful how a man, 
in zeal and expression so extreme, kept the middle 



GENIUS : FATHER TAYLOR. 335 

path. Prohibition he opposed ; said, people arriving 
tired and late ought to be allowed some refreshment ; 
and, being asked his views of the unexecuted pro- 
hibitory law, keenly replied, " I did not know there 
was in Massachusetts any such law ! " For examiners 
and lawyers he was a terrible man to have in the 
witness-box. Yet warmer friend of temperance 
nobody could be. He said he would have " all the 
alcohol buried in a cave, and a planet rolled to the 
door." What a Peter the Hermit he would have been, 
enlisted in any cause ! But he thought reformers 
overstated, and were dangerous and unjust. He was 
too sympathetic for the work of those who have to 
disown society, to put on John the Baptist's leathern 
girdle, and war against base organic ways. To be a 
crusader, he must have been made of sterner stuff. 
Well that he did not leave his own stint. The com- 
monweal is a factory, in which each operative must 
be held mainly to his special task. The good genius, 
that made him in general at once so brilliant and just, 
and wrought mightily through him like the demon of 
Socrates, was not always present. Sometimes he 
failed and floundered ; and the friends or strangers, 
that had come to be transported, hung their heads. 
The engine was detached, and the train halted, though 
he was often dextrous to recover himself and escape. 
" I have lost my nominative case," he said once, " but 
I am on the way to glory." A ship entangled in its 
manoeuvres is worse off' than a skiff*. All the move- 
ments of his mind were radical, and could suffer no 
mortgage. "What are you going to preach about 
next Sunday.?" he was asked. "I do not know: I 



336 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

shall not forestall God ! " His quickness could not be 
anticipated or outsped. " I never let a carriage go 
before me," he said. His foot was the type of his 
thought. Beside the canonical Scriptures I know 
not what he read but the old English divines ; and 
perhaps no man of note ever wrote so little, in the 
modern world. " Why do you go round so, muttering 
to yourself? " he was asked. " Because I like to talk 
to a sensible man." But he had the broadest sight and 
the deepest heart. He was charged with inconsistency 
for sympathizing with both sides in a quarrel. But 
he saw truth and right on both sides. " Disinterested ! " 
he said ; " I like not the word : I am interested." If 
religion consists in fearing God, he was not a religious 
man. " Do you see the black speck? " he said, lifting 
a child to baptize. On no bed-plate of a creed did 
his machinery move. His tenets were shrouds, only 
better to help him spread his sails. Any resentment 
in him of a new opinion was not ignorance, but fore- 
cast of the mischief into which he supposed it would 
lead. He was a loyal Christian ; nor from his moor- 
ings could be torn. Yet he fed with his face, and 
wanted to feed on all others' faces. His artist nature 
froze, and the shadow of an infinite grief fell on 
him when he was misunderstood ; and he could be 
overheard sobbing and groaning in his room. It is 
the lot of genius ! God taxes us on the amount of 
our property \ and to be driven to appeal to him is 
the condition of excellence. Yet he said he had 
never seen an unhappy day. Boston was his crown. 
How dear to him the Port Society ! " Laugh till I 
get back," was one of his farewells. He said of a 



GENIUS : FATHER TAYLOR. 337 

gloomy theologian, " He seems to have killed some- 
body, and wants me to help bury the body." The 
reconciling is the highest mind. It was the glory of 
Jesus. Taylor was an atonement for us. He said 
the Good Samaritan did not " maul the wounded 
traveller with texts." " O Lord ! we are a widow," 
was his prayer for a bereaved wife. He threw a little 
fish he had caught back into the sea, saying, " There, 
go tell your grandmother you have seen a ghost ! " 
The chaise he once owned was always so full of rag- 
ged children, his own family could not get seats. But 
all his sentiment was the soaring of common sense. 
It was the weight not of a sparrow, but an eagle. In 
the noble Methodist no jot of Methodist cant. The 
little girl, who explained her kneeling at his coffin by 
saying, " He was my friend," and the orange-woman 
who walked up the aisle of the crowded church with 
her basket on her arm, were his witnesses. 

Newness is a mark of genius. Taylor was full of 
surprises and novelties. He astonished a minister, 
who had refused to enter his pulpit because a Unitarian 
had been in it, by falling on his knees on the pulpit- 
stairs and crying out, " O Lord ! deliver us in Boston 
from two things, bad rum and bigotry : thou knowest 
which is worst, for I don't ! " When Lincoln suc- 
ceeded Buchanan, he gave Father Abraham an outfit 
of benediction and gracious prophecy. " But, O Lord ! 
as for this stuff that is going out, we won't say much 
about that ! " Reading a proclamation after an elec- 
tion, and pronouncing the words, " God save the Com- 
monwealth^' he added, " He did that last Tuesday ! " 
He also prayed that the " creatures about the Presi- 

22 



338 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

dent would not bore a hole through the sheathing of 
his integrity." After some trivial talk was over, at a 
conference, he informed the speakers he was glad to 
see the " light stuff floating off*." " Won't you make 
a prayer before you go?" said a woman to him in her 
house. "What do you want?" he asked; "I can't 
make a prayer." He said of metaphysicians, " They 
are like lightning-bugs in a cedar-swamp in Carolina : 
snap, snap, and there seems a little light ; then all 
dark as ever." Mr. Webster ridiculed the Higher 
Law, comparing it to the Blue Ridge and other things 
above all practical concern. Taylor said, " Higher 
Law ! a meteoric stone : stand from under ! " It killed 
Mr. Webster. His opposition to it was the unpardon- 
able sin. He knew better. Taylor said to some 
stolid worshippers, " I would as lief have so many 
canes and umbrellas in the pews ! I see some fat 
people, corpulent. That is swine's flesh." How the 
obesity shrank from his eyes peering round ! As a 
visitor concluded his patronizing survey of the Mari- 
ner's House, Taylor said, "Now we will hear any 
other up-town sinner who wants to confess." He 
explained the verdict of the governor on the " good 
wine, kept until now," by saying it was the best of 
water in the jars, of which "that old soaker knew 
not the taste." He said to a minister, some of whose 
young folk a new pulpit celebrity had taken away, 
" I understand he has had his shovel under your 
garden-flowers." Leaving home, this was his pic- 
ture of Providence : " He, that gives the whale a cart- 
load of herrings every morning for breakfast, will 
take care of my babes." Called upon by an impatient 



GENIUS : FATHER TAYLOR. 339 

throng, waiting for Webster to speak, he hushed them 
by saying, " I never saw such a crowd of good-nature." 
The wonder of his pathos was, that when you cried, 
and he was crying more, tears rolling down to bathe 
his face, he kept on swift and even as the ten-feet 
diameter wheels in an express train. He described 
Channing dying, with the setting sun making its way 
into the chamber through the clambering vines ; and 
melted his hearers with the charge, " Walk in the 
light, walk in the light ! " His wife gave him fifty 
dollars to pay a bill. He brought the bill with no 
receipt. "What have you done with the money?" 
she asked. " Why, I met a superannuated brother, 
and how could I ask him to change fifty dollars?" 
Describing some sot, he exclaimed, " I will pursue 
that man, and never give him up ! " His little child 
thought it was his face made the flower open, and 
said, " It is sunshine, father ; isn't it?" He loved like 
God. 

But his genius had authority too for its mark. He 
denounced a troublesome shiftless character as an 
" expensive machine." His brain was camera and 
battery too. "Can a Calvinist be a Christian?" he 
asked Dr. Bushnell. " Certainly ! " was the reply. 
" Don't be too quick ! Suppose God should say to the 
elect in heaven. Now I will turn this stick, and give 
the other end a chance: would they be content?" 
One, who had given information secretly about his 
conduct in the sick-room, asked him to say grace at 
table. He found her out ; and, stirring his cofi:'ee, and 
not shutting his eyes, but looking straight at her, said, 
"Lord, deliver us from deceit, conceit, and tattling!" 



340 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

The boy that ran away from home when nine years 
old was, as Mr. Webster said of himself, rather hard 
to coax, and harder to drive. The reformers, he 
thought, tried to drive him, and his back was up. He 
could not be second, being first. He was called com- 
modore, and felt he was in command. He curried 
not the favor he got. When fashionable folk took the 
sailors' seats in the Bethel, he told them they must 
stand, and not Jack. He was superbly polite and 
deferential, but in no company subordinate or abashed. 
No culture could exceed the polish his substance took ; 
but he was at the head. This guest was equal to any 
host. He was a chief in his black cravat ; and, when 
he had been combed, how handsome he sat while the 
wisest hung on his lips, from which every word was 
an artist's piece in color ! " The sea, majestic ! " he 
said ; and his face was " the wrinkled sea," with all 
its grandeur, and the incalculable laughter of which 
y^schylus writes. For him there must be " more 
sea ! " He had the dignity of one on the quarter-deck. 
"If my employers are not content, they shall see the 
back seams of my stockings." He would have been 
like Adoniram Judson, of whom the captain he took 
passage with told me that, when the ship was attacked 
by pirates, he loaded and fired faster than any man he 
ever saw. Taylor was not mealy-mouthed. A Uni- 
tarian preacher having descanted on the ever-lingering 
misery of sinful memory after repentance, he compared 
him to a beetle-bug rolling over the sand his ball of 
dirt. Something supreme and final was always in 
the sentence he pronounced. He was lowly and lordly 
too. The belt of no man or woman was adorned with 



GENIUS : FATHER TAYLOR. 34I 

his scalp. " He will have his hide on the fence to- 
morrow," said a coarse man, of the way a certain 
master would proceed with his opponent. Easy to be 
entreated as Taylor was, he was ready for whoever 

wanted to contend, and meant there should be no 

■» 

drawn battle. Seeing a man in the pulpit whom he 
did not like, he turned rapidly to leave the house. 
His genius was no wandering impulse : he was borne 
on as a billow, but with a mighty design. There is an 
inspiration to the will from the perception of truth 
which gives the right to decide and direct. The doc- 
trine of Infallibility is true, though not of the pope as 
such. Sixtus said the truth had been committed to 
him, though he sometimes thought he had lost the 
key ! It is committed to every man who knows that 
truth is truth, knows it when he sees it. Human falli- 
bility is a mean phrase. Uncertainty is atheism and 
despair. My beholding warrants my affirming. In- 
tuition justifies assumption ; and Taylor, because he 
transmitted, swayed. 

A sure mark of genius is its clothing of grace. 
Nature, says Goethe, is pledged to the protection of 
genius ; and she protects not only its life, but its action 
and speech from all deformity and bad taste. Taylor's 
most unforeseeable flights kept the line of order ; and 
accomplished philosophers were awkward and angular 
before the flexile motions of his body and mind. In 
his oddest figures we had to own a charm. When he 
said of a famous soprano singer, " She screams like a 
pea-hen," or of the two or three, that came to the meet- 
ing, out of a great body, " These are the absorbents ; " 
he showed himself a detective of correspondences 
Swedenborg might admire. 



342 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Another note of genius is fresence of mind^ or the 
whole man at the occasion, in what he says and does ; 
though we call its inattention and deafness to our 
irrelevant trifles of talk and procedure absence of 
mind. It knows where it is ! "I feel," said Ole Bull, 
after an improvisation on the violin, " as if I had been 
in other worlds." " The light that never was on land 
or sea " is sometimes in a human face. Female vanity 
hides little jets of gas-light under the hair to make a 
halo round the head. But Taylor was like Moses : he 
wist not that his face shone. Presence of mind in him 
was sometimes absence of body as well as self-oblivion. 
He forgot his wedding-day, and was out on Telegraph 
Hill, in Hull, with a spy-glass, talking of his dear 
Deborah, when she was waiting for him to keep his 
appointment as a bridegroom in Marblehead. Nature 
was strong in his character. This convert had no 
change of heart ; though listening to Mr. Hedding's 
sermon he said, " I cried for quarters soon." 

One more trait of genius is continuity . He did not, 
like oratorical experts, hoard his good things to say 
over again, so that following him round we had the 
same old fund of commonplaces and store of jokes ; 
but went on, his word a marvel to everybody and not 
less to himself, fresh as the morning or a new-blown 
rose ; because his was not Everett's art or Phillips's 
genius for elocution, but his own of eloquence. He 
was fearless of death, but stoutly said he would not 
give up till he was dead. Being told he was going to 
the angels : " Folks better than angels !" he said. He 
was grieved because the last time a friend visited him 
he could not wait upon her to the door. Shortly 



GENIUS : FATHER TAYLOR. 



343 



before his death he went several times to the glass and 
addressed himself as another man needing salvation, 
saying, " I guess you are not ready ; you, old man and 
infidel, have not made up your mind : " then looked at 
himself with silent scorn, as if comparing his reduced 
estate with former glory. His last audible prayer 
was : " Lord, what am I here for? What am I doing 
here ? I'm no use to anybody. The love my friends 
have for me will soon be gone. The love I have for 
my friends will soon be gone. Now, Lord, some 
morning suddenly snatch me to thyself!" The Lord 
heard ; the Lord did ! He went, as a sailor would, 
just at the turn of the tide. It was ebb-tide here : it 
was flood-tide somewhere. The death below was a 
mighty birth above. Such a soul, beyond miracle or 
prophecy, is proof of immortality. A brother once 
said to him, " Give me a subject." " It would be too 
hot for you to hold," he answered. Marvellous such 
a flame burnt so long ! The fire has not gone out, but 
the fuel. Must there not be more fuel for such a fire? 
I ask leave to see it burn again ! He was restless the 
last nights ; and his nurse, a man that slept by him, 
tried to keep him in bed, as if with an unconscious 
hand. " Do you know," Taylor said to him, " how 
smoothly you are sinning? You are trying to cheat 
the Devil ; but he will find you out ! " Happy continu- 
ation now is not that unrest? 

Shall we not say he was one of the universal men ? 
He resists all sectarian claim or classification. He drew 
every furrow with a subsoil plough. He was not a 
local celebrity, but an honor to mankind. Unknown 
to literature, he will be a tradition in the common 



wX 



344 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

mind. Across the line of party he stood a colossus 
guarding the harbor for humanity. He was a Rad- 
ical, not born late, out of due time, as Paul said, but 
before the time. Yet he was no heretic, but a uniter, 
reaching the man in all men. He spoke not to one 
set or sort of persons, but was understood with equal 
delight by every class. Fine lady and scholar — Miss 
Bremer and Jenny Lind and Charles Dickens — 
mixed, in the Bethel, with the tars that had anchors 
in India ink on the back of their hands, or clumsy 
rings in their ears, or vertebras of sharks to hold the 
kerchiefs round their necks. Two hundred millions 
of miles measure the diameter of the earth's orbit for 
the yard-stick of astronomy. The circuit of his revo- 
lution was a parallax for the race. 

Faith is a mark of genius. Systems of doubt or 
pessimism have been built by able logicians, but never 
by intuitive men. For every truth of the spirit is a lie 
in the understanding ; and the head, informed but by 
the senses, is an infidel and atheist. The finer intel- 
lect of love and imagination discerns truth and being. 
This intelligence in Taylor was so perfect, — his 
thought was in such contact with the ideal thing, — 
that he never talked o'l faith. That seems to inter- 
pose a process between the faculty and its object. 
He knew., and had a lofty scorn for anybody's refusal 
of the term knowledge to spiritual matters. He 
owned the One God in some Trinitarian way, as the 
Athanasian Trinity hints the infinite mystery better 
than that bald Hebrew and Unitarian monotheism in 
which God is an individual ; although a three-fold 
Deity be not so good as a manifold. 



GENIUS : FATHER TAYLOR. 



345 



Once more, a mark of genius is joy. It denies the 
reality of wickedness or woe, and affirms the preva- 
lence of the Good. It chants the rhythm of the river 
of God. The test of the soundness of any scheme is. 
Can it be sung? Is the essence of harmony and 
poetry in it.? We are told there is a wedding of 
misery and music in some famous compositions, as 
Bach's St. Matthew passion-music, Dante's " Inferno," 
and Milton's "Paradise Lost." But the wretched 
tenets never inspired the tune. The wondrous score 
of the Prince of harmonists means from his choral 
soul more and other than the Calvinism attached to it. 
The old dogmas hang as a weight on the wings of the 
English bard, and make his poem, which Dr. Chan- 
ning called " perhaps the noblest monument of human 
genius," in parts heavy reading. It is the justice, 
not the curse, that gives such lurid glory to the 
Italian's lines. Yet both these mighty works are of 
the past, — Songs, as David says, of degrees, dimin- 
ishing, — hardly of the present, not at all of the future, 
and sure to feel the tooth of time as the conceptions 
they grew out of are outgrown by the advancing 
human mind. " Faust," for eschewing their fatality, 
may outlast them, till itself yield to some deeper dis- 
covery of the gladness of creation's root. Wiggles- 
worth's " Day of Doom " and Pollok's " Course of 
Time " are just expressions of the gloomy theology in 
its discord of untruth, — the harmonies of Orthodoxy 
being to those of the coming faith as Chinese gongs 
to Beethoven's symphonies. Taylor was the happy 
nature. He was a day of jubilee. The Sun of 
Righteousness was always rising on him, and the 



34^ RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

vapors could not stay. The burden of sin, he de- 
clared, could be dropped in a moment. He admitted 
no essential evil ; and, though he said devil^ he de- 
spised and routed that adversary as Luther did. With 
his iri'esistible cheer, he practised the apostolic gift of 
absolution to sad and despairing men, as well as Peter 
or John. He was not tolerant on the surface and a 
bigot at the core, like some Radicals, as sour when 
they are ripe as when they are green. No dogmatism 
sailed under the flag of his liberality, and no Indiffer- 
entism stretched his charity so wide. He was no 
eclectic, with a patch-work of opinions picked from 
every quarter ; and no syncretist, in whose mind con- 
tradictory notions throve together. He professed not 
that large swallow for all sorts of belief, which is 
called catholicity, and means crudity. Nor had he 
any scrupulosity to thrust on others, by which to 
square their conduct to his judgment, and sacrifice 
God and man on the shrine of a morbid conscience. 
He never flew in your face with ill-advised interfer- 
ence, nor crowded you with that self-pronouncing and 
intruding individuality which by dint of present hon- 
esty and absent sympathy becomes the worst tyranny. 
His weight was not oppression. He was no cynic, 
taking exceptions ; and, if he could roar, he did not 
know how to bark. He was in no covert, conceiving 
suspicions, pregnant with plots, or hatching any hate. 
If he was ever for a moment angry, he never nursed his 
spite. His presence was a lifting of the curtains and 
letting in the sun. He was a medium, and God not a 
scientific conclusion he waited for, or a metaphysical 
abstraction constructed of arguments, like a child's 



GENIUS : FATHER TAYLOR. 347 

doll of rags, but a living spring, not to be cut from 
the stream ; appearing best not in the earth or the sky, 
but that image of himself in which he made man. 

Whence came this prodigy of power? What blood 
of England or Italy flowed in his veins? Neither he 
nor his seem to have known. He is our King Mel- 
chisedec, without father or mother, every thing hid 
but his divine descent. . We must claim for an Ameri- 
can one whose patriotism would have made him 
equally ready with Franklin to argue in a foreign 
court, or with Farragut to lash himself to the mast in 
the harbor of New Orleans. He hated secession as 
Satan ; and, while at home with foreigners of every 
nation, was proud of his native land as the crown of 
the globe. He was a case of Nature's bounty in her 
most royal mood, and, himself a true sovereign, the 
head of every board at which he sat. Doubtless in 
him was something presiding that could not take the 
inferior part. When his little daughter, being chid 
for ill-reading, took it to heart, he said : " Don't be a 
fool. Why don't you go on?" — "Because, father, I 
am a fool." — " Yes," he rejoined, " that is a capital 
thing to find out ! " quenching in drollery his severity, 
with that interplay of faculties always at his command. 
Is not this genius^ to blend all powers in one? We 
knew not what he would do next ; only it would be 
some happy turn ; for he was not of that order of 
mind that sees the dark side and flies to the sore spot, 
the critic that spoils conversation and shuts out those 
whom he is intent on convicting from enriching him- 
self. It was Taylor's generosity to be open and 
receptive, — to give and take as a child. 



34^ RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

How account for this phenomenon of genius? It is 
easier to assign its characteristics than its conditions. 
We shall trace its origin, when we can give the gen- 
esis of God. There is nothing a metaphysician will 
not attempt ; but no manufactory has yet been set 
up to deliver such articles as I have described, run 
smoothly as the barren machine of a theory will. 
"Who shall tell his generation?" Even the Christ 
Christendom worships is no pure historic person, but 
in part a creation of the human mind. Glory of 
Greek myth through John's Gospel flows in to fill out 
the synoptic figure of the other evangelists into sub- 
limity ; and Paul is so entranced with the ideal 
Saviour of inward revelation, he does not want to see 
the actual one of flesh and blood ; while we never 
hear of Thomas as inspired to do aught with his 
proof of fingers in the print of the nails, and hand 
thrust into the side ! Plato translates into poetry the 
Socratic prose. But Jesus was the poet of God. 
What he showed and acted he melodiously spoke. It 
was a near and intimate fact. In something like the 
same solution was Nature in this loyal disciple's mind. 
He used no telescope of philosophic thought. Nothing 
was far from him. Such manifestations as came from 
the untaught mariner's minister escape analysis. The 
breathing they articulate who can measure or under- 
stand ? 



w 



XV. 

EXPERIENCE. 

'HEN Paul spoke of himself, he said he spoke 
as a fool. Yet how glad we are he spoke ! 
In the assizes, answering to the apostle's confession, 
held for a minister on his anniversary days, he seems 
to have an unfair advantage. He is judge, jury, advo- 
cate, witness on the stand, sheriff, and prisoner in the 
box, which the pulpit is. He is all but the spectators 
in court. Yet they are the silent bench with which 
lies the decision of his competency. I plead guilty, 
after protracted illness, of which I gave no speech or 
voluntary sign. To all concerned, let me say, the 
confession could have come earlier only as a groan. 
Now it is detached from experience into a thought, I 
feel that any suspicion of my wrongly remaining a 
minister tallies with my own judgment. 

" Superfluous lags a veteran on the stage." 

I have lingered, hoping to be a helper still, haunted 
by some dream of being more useful because of what 
I have endured. But I would especially give a lesson 
of sympathy for that class of patients I have belonged 
to, called nervous^ always numerous in a community 



350 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

under high pressure, and with many cases arising 
from the tremendous strain of our civil war. Is this 
sort of sickness hard to bear with? It is harder to 
bear ! Wiiat are its symptoms ? Loss of appetite, 
loathing of exercise, and greater disgust of quiet, dis- 
content alike with motion or rest, irritability of fibre, 
magnifying of trifles of dispute, indecision, and dis- 
satisfaction with either alternative, preference of the 
thing we did not choose or was not cho.sen for us, 
impotent thought, fugitive sleep. Sleep He gives to 
his beloved : does he hate those from whom it is with- 
held? Sleep, God's sub-creator of the human body 
and soul, his £eon or emanation needful to plants and 
animals, preserver of reason, fender-off' of death, more 
to us than food ; sleep, which we must have, even at 
the cost of a poisonous drug, else expire or become 
insane ; sleep, for which God made poppy, opium, 
and ether, and chloral, — that is the banished friend, 
vainly implored visitor of the weak or disordered 
brain that needs it most. 

" O gentle sleep, how have I frighted thee?" 

"Macbeth hath murdered sleep." 

It was the worst of all capital crimes. Young man 
or woman, do no evil or excess to kill your sleep ! 

"When restless on mj bed I lie, 

Still courting sleep, which still will flj : " 

How often, as the midnight hours rolled slowly on, 
and my bed became not a refuge, but a rack, have I 
repeated and thanked that good bishop Noel for the 
lines his own necessity must have inspired ! How 
often have I lain, and noted the signs of the city's 



EXPERIENCE. 35 1 

waking : the scream of an earl}' train near the station, 

— an affront to the sick that ought to be put away by 
some substitute of noiseless signals, — the tread of 
some preposterous walker before peep of dawn, the 
rattle of a milk-cart getting the start of any coach ; at 
last, the street official putting out the gas-light, without 

— let us be thankful for so much — his noisy ladder 
now ; and, all through, alternating with fits and 
snatches of uneasy slumber, the clang of the neighbor- 
ing town-clock, telling the hours or tolling them for 
whom, — man or woman, — in the glare of some 
night-lamp drawing the last breath ! Putting the 
head in a particular position, counting mathematical 
figures, walking like Franklin round the chamber, 
and many other specifics against sleeplessness, have 
been prescribed. I have found tranquil prayer for 
sleep the best. He who does not sleep is never truly 
awake. The calenture of the night succeeds coma- 
tose dozing in the day. Capacity for comfort fails : 
the charm of life is gone. 

The sufferer endures a curious divorce of eye and 
heart. He sees clearly what he cannot enjoy. " Beauti- 
ful ! " cried those who rode with me through woods 
and flowers, along the Connecticut banks, round Sun- 
day Mountain, in New Hampshire, or curving in and 
out of the beaches and tide-lapped indentations of 
Cape Ann. " I perceive it," I answered, " but do not 
feel. Strange ! I who have felt such things so much." 
" Sublime ! " sang my fellow-voyagers of the sea, roof- 
ing its calm floor with the eternal vault, or rolling its 
surface into floating crests that mocked the fixed ones 
of the everlasting hills. les: I could give it an 



352 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

understanding, but no heart or tongue ! The great 
Atlantic, shouldering with the weight of a thousand 
leagues of billows against the harborless Azores, the 
ship-devouring rocks, like tusks, the light froth on 
which I could distinguish three miles off; Fayal, 
with its lovely gardens to match almost those of Kew 
or Versailles ; Madeira, frequented by English in- 
valids, a huge emerald, with color more enchanting 
for the mist that laced its sides, and curled through 
every rugged gorge ; Teneriffe, like which, Milton 
says, Satan stood, but which seemed to me not defiant, 
rather as one that bore a smoking censer, and wor- 
shipped before God ; Oritava, a town creeping safe 
into the hollows betwixt its spurs of brown volcanic 
tufa and the boundless surge, — these are pictures I 
gaze at now, with my mind's eye, with tenfold more 
pleasure than when I sa"w them indeed. As I leaned, 
and would scarce have resented or resisted being 
thrown over the gunwale, the floating sea-weed on 
the blue water seemed less adrift and more at home 
than I. The pine barrens of that big sand-bank, and 
last bit of the continent which the Gulf slipped off 
from, — Florida, — delight me in reflection as they did 
not when I wandered through them, and picked from 
the rugged waste, in February, as delicate blossoms 
as New England field or garden can show in June. 

It is a question, through which we get most, the 
eye or ear. The deaf and blind w^ould not agree ! I 
should say the eye ; yet, in some conditions of de- 
bility, more from the ear, partly that it is a more 
passive organ. There never was a time when a 
hymn sweetly sung by a human voice, or the piano 



EXPERIENCE. 353 

struck by a friendly hand, or the church-organ making 
the pews tremble, or gushing through the windows, 
as I wandered outside, too weak to go in,' could not 
soothe a little the agitated soul. But Jesus was right, 
as he always is : the Spirit is the Comforter. When 
I could not enjoy conversation, or write a letter, or 
without reluctance sign my name, or visit a friend, or 
do the terrible business of shaving my beard, or read 
a book or column of a newspaper, save sentence by 
sentence, and nobody wrote to me, because I wrote to 
nobody ; when my nature recoiled from a familiar 
face, like the hand of a boy first touching a galvanic 
battery ; when the Diary I took abroad with me to 
make notes in came back blank as it went, without 
one record ; when I could not think or love or pray, 
save as in lucid intervals the pall lifted to shut me in 
again, — then, the sun being gone, some One, as in 
the English Hunt's picture, came with a lantern. The 
blaze of ideas, whence I knew not, visited my 
wintry season ; as the earth's procession through the 
shower of countless stars comes at the dismal November 
section of its annual round. Talk of poor Joseph cast 
into an empty pit ! This mental depression is a pit of 
deeper vacuity, harder than solitary confinement in 
jail. When a noble woman, living companionless 
with her disease, was admonished for saying God's 
dealing with her had been rather hard, she answered, 
smiling : " Oh, I tell him worse things than that when 
I am with him alone ! " Have you never been tempted 
to remonstrate like Job, or cry, with Luther, " God, 
art thou dead? " The medicines in his chest, like the 
arrows in his quiver, exceed computation. Yet " how 

23 



354 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

long, O Lord ? " Why wonder what Christ meant by 
being abandoned ? Has not everybody been in Geth- 
semane? TravelHng does not take you there. 'Tis 
not by steam or rail you arrive. I want no com- 
mentator to tell me what particular Psalm he quoted 
from. I have been down with him, unable to cope 
with Nature or struggle with the crowd, — " the world 
too many for me," as said poor dying Tulliver, in the 
story. The earth rejected me, too weary to stand or 
walk ; the air rejected me, chilled with its slightest 
east or northern flaw ; the sea rejected me, sick of its 
easiest motion. I was the man overboard, with head 
under and hand uplifted, whom no rope is thrown to. 
What shall I do? Whither can I go? " Why^ hast 
thou forsaken me ? " 

When the substance of anguish had passed, a long 
comet's tail, such as you have seen athwart the 
heavens, of thinness and inefficiency, drew after. But 
"in a hundred and fifty days," we read, the deluge 
abated, " and the tops of the mountains were seen." 
Every cloud is fugitive : the sun remains, holds his 
station, and is bigger than any cloud. By impercep- 
tible degrees, strength returns, grain by grain, too 
small for a month of them to be weighed ; atoms from 
the ground through a million foot-falls, particles from 
the atmosphere to the convalescing invalid the very 
breath and Spirit of God, undulations from the light 
the sick man lies and suns himself in, as beams of His 
countenance. He seems conscious of invisible incre- 
ments from the jar and jolt of every ship or carriage 
that drags or tosses him across the hobbly land, or 
over the shifting, uneven deep ; most of all from looks 



EXPERIENCE. 355 

of that unaltered human love, best witness of the 
Divine. I was in need, and found help. After break- 
ing the bread, I was famished myself. Then I fed on 
friends' faces. Others' death and sorrow, which I had 
grappled with, got me in their grip. Why did I not 
give up my Church.? I was too selfish. I was so 
identified with it, in a common circulation, I felt I 
was gone if I gave it up ; I should have died. I 
clung to it as my life-boat. I hung to it as a sailor to 
a spar aloft in a hurricane, or half-drowned in the 
boiling gulf. If I could not keep hold of some sup- 
port, I was lost. My office was my support. The 
line of good-will which I grasped, I was buoyed up 
by. If others' patience gave out, they never told me, 
and I knew it not. If God be as considerate as man 
and woman, there is nothing to fear. 

In my enforced vacation, I wrote a dozen discourses, 
as an anxious squirrel lays up nuts for winter in his 
nest. I have scarce looked at them since. Thank 
God not for ease, but for work ! Complaint of labor, 
in mill, shop, trench, or dock? The privilege is to 
toil. If I can do it any way, — at desk or tackle, 
with hammer or pen, — my neighbors may have all 
the play. I had envied the dogs in Jacksonville that, 
as I sat tired on some door-stone, licked the sores not 
of my flesh, but my heart. I thank those dogs ! My 
pain is mine, my property. I have been rich in it, 
made a large investment I cannot part with, and no- 
body can rob me of. I suppose it would be accounted 
no charity to give it away. But it pays well. It has 
cancelled self-love, quenched worldly ambition, signed 
and sealed me to sincerity, offset undue love of life, 



356 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

made the grave attractive, assa)^ed the worth of many 
a friendship, wiped out worthless securities ; reckoned 
up, among various obligations, the bad debts, Hke 
notes all have held, — the sums not worth the paper 
they are written on, — and left a great remainder on 
the credit side. Be sick or sad, and who is cruel or 
kind you will find out fast enough ! 

But, partially competent again in body, am I so in 
mind? Have I got softening of the brain? Are my 
views infidel and unsound ? I have refused to swear 
by any words or symbols of sect. Ecclesiastical 
independence, absolute freed6m of thought, — have I 
by these wasted my Lord's goods? Long accounted 
a poor sort of believer, sometimes denied entrance to 
Unitarian or Universalist pulpits, given to understand 
that religious organs would not welcome contributions 
from my pen, — if I am now invited to write, and 
find myself unexpectedly no outcast from either wing, 
in full communion of good-will with Radical and Con- 
servative schools, I take it as a sign of the advance of 
ideas in Theology. I would help both sides with 
what is true in either, but commit myself to none. 
The trifling touch of martyrdom, the little taste of 
excommunication, has been to me no injury, but a 
real treat. I early discovered that reputation, popu- 
larity for actor or preacher, so far from being a thing 
to be seized or coveted, is the chief danger, and almost 
inevitable harm. When David said, " I am small and 
despised," did he reflect but for that he would never 
have written his psalm ? It is a great blessing to be 
obscure and unnoticed, not run after or asked to speak 
on platforms, to pray on great occasions, or say grace 



EXPERIENCE. 



357 



at public tables. " I am nobody," said a good woman, 
after telling me what she thought. — " Is it," I an- 
swered, "because you are all spirit?" It is very 
good to be no body^ and go down into this cavern of 
nothingness, where no human favor follows, and love 
of approbation cannot breathe. Does not the miner 
get his treasure out of the rayless bowels of the earth, 
as the diver fetches up pearls, and ingots of sunken 
ships, from airless depths where no lungs but his could 
hold their own ? So spiritual riches are drawn out of 
the humiliations where mortal vanity dies, and nought 
but irrepressible persuasion can survive. Thus we 
learn the Spirit is more and greater than any form of 
religion, superior to and including Christianity, using 
it as prime minister. 

Of this teaching, the test is the opposition it waxes 
through, like the day-star. Its seal is the sickness and 
grief it suffices for. Its demonstration is in souls con- 
tent with information from that secret tongue all scrip- 
tures are but sentences of, dropped by the way, and, like 
your conversation of yesterday, forgot in new calls ! 
From everlasting to everlasting its speech of instruc- 
tion and consolation. God's accessibility to man and 
man's to God is all. The explosion of the old dogma 
of verbal inspiration, falling before geology like Metz 
and Strasbourg at the tread of the German hosts, drives 
us from the letter that killeth, to refuge in the pavil- 
ion of Real Presence. The miracle to which study 
turns all creation dwarfs special wonders. The proof 
of one God appears not in the first verse of Genesis, 
but in the style of Nature graven on pages of rock 
and in tables of the heart. It is not made of meta- 



358 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

physic star-dust, like the solar system of nebulse, but 
inborn. The depth saith, It is not in me ; and the sea 
saith, It is not with me ; but God knoweth the place 
of wisdom. The evidence of immortality rises in our 
consciousness of qualities that cannot perish, of whose 
endurance no resurrection is more than a sign. Can 
science^ groping among things ponderable or impon- 
derable in its scales, grub up any demonstration apart 
from that c<?^-science which is its own head and king.f* 
The Church I rejoice in is aloof from strife, — a step- 
ping-stone between contending sects, and across the 
\Vildly running stream of controversy. 

But these themes may be dwelt upon too much, to 
the sacrifice of health ! To this judgment I demur. 
Whatever injury may arise from imprudent habit or 
undue sensibilit}', honed like a razor by social duties, I 
impute none to an over-wrought intellect, least of all to 
the particular line of investigation pursued, or the con- 
clusions reached. Free-thinking has odium enough 
to bear, w^ithout being made the scapegoat of private 
infirmities. When I have had to contrive all sorts of 
ways, — gazing into shop-windows, perusing the pan- 
orama of faces unrolling on the high-way, riding in 
cars, lifting in gymnasiums, rowing in boats, looking 
at pictures, doing mechanical jobs about the house, 
and falling so low as to play backgammon, to get along 
and make the day pass ; when time became the pil- 
lory I stood in, not the chariot I was borne by, and an 
hour was a heavy thing for me to carry ; — how amus- 
ing to be told, " Don't work too hard, but rest ! These 
ingenious investigations are doing you or anybody no 
good." As Horatio said to Hamlet, it was hinted to me, 



EXPERIENCE. 359 

" 'Twere to consider too curiously, 
To consider so." 

Alas ! not work, but to be forced to strike work, is 
what kills. I was dying in the Sahara of a barren 
brain, starving for want of bread from the month of 
God. Duty is restoration. It makes the desert in 
us blossom as the rose. Is this but a fond fancy of 
returning faculty, when the actual power is gone.? 
As Nature hides ruins with moss, she may conceal the 
inward ruin of men growing in years with an illusion 
of freshness and wonted strength. The hunter leaves 
the hollow tree he has rifled of its honey : people will 
not resort to us for knowledge, when no more sweet- 
ness is left in this hive of the brain, or only some 
whimsical, solitary bee, in the shape of an odd notion, 
buzzes in the bonnet of one's head. There is not 
much more music in him : he is getting old, and rides 
his hobby ! Is that hobby an eternal idea, deserving a 
better name ? Has the minister any thing more to 
say? Affection, however tender, will not draw people 
to the failing voice, on whose resources of vital vigor 
they once hung. / have nothing to say to gather a 
throng. What the multitude follovv^, I cannot furnish ; 
for I do not follow it myself. Where it is afforded, I 
could not, save as a task, go to meeting. When I see 
by what cheap gifts the masses of men are sum- 
moned ; how even the Liberal Church is led not by 
its wisest, but some of its shallowest men ; when, in 
what is vulgarly considered eloquence, I note the 
violence, as of a deafening gun, while those whose 
accents thrill me have no wide hearing, — then I 
ponder the truth of Christ's text of the broad and 



360 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

narrow way. The multitude ran after him not for 
doctrine or miracle, but for the loaves. Said a maga- 
zine editor: "I could improve my articles fifty per 
cent, and diminish my subscription list at the same 
rate." You can fill your pews, as you can your pock- 
ets, with what would never fill or feed, but only make 
lean, your souls. Do I cheapen others' gifts to chant 
my own wares? I value captivating qualities, if 
solidity go along with show. Be fascinated, if you 
can be saved ! But take some organ of principle, not 
a compromiser who can play well, using an audience 
as the instrument to accompany the tones with which 
he voices his own love of influence or ambition of fame ! 
A minister no more than any other man can thrive 
without fellowship. Self-sustaining as we may be, 
doubtless they keep us alive who persuade us we are 
of some importance, and that there is reason for us to 
stay yet for a time in the world. So Jesus was en- 
couraged by Martha and Mary, by Lazarus and John, 
and all those common people who heard him gladly, 
because they had more sense than the deaf Pharisee 
or Scribe. 

Sickness is a thing to be ashamed of. Somebody 
has blundered ! The ignominious egotism, to which 
no reader will suppose vanity could tempt, may have 
value of testimony, especially as regards health. " My 
child is prostrate," said one : " what has cured you P " 
The answer is, perpetual open air, with its slow 
uplifting of the body, like the Spirit's of the soul. 
Nature, and no man, is the resurrection doctor. The 
roof and the furnace are our foes. Embrace Nature, 
and she will befriend you. The earth is the Lord's. 



EXPERIENCE. 361 

We must respect it in us and out of us, or it will take 
its revenge, and resolve us from this sensitive frame 
into itself. 

But the moral relief is not less signal. Have you 
suffered any grief, calamity, disappointment,, or treach- 
ery, through whose wound from a falsely trusted hand 
your life threatens to bleed away ? Take it with you 
to the temple, the house of God, which he makes of 
beauty and strength, without hands ; and you will soon 
find you have left it behind. My Judas did not go 
with me into the woods, and I could not discover my 
sorrow on the sea. The dust of the ground stanched 
my stabs ; the rippling air cooled the fever of my 
mind, and the chasing waves bore off every trouble 
faster than the sailing ships. What power, without 
intruding, entered so deep? 

The elements are the nurses, too, of faith. When 
my life was fading away, I took my companion with 
me to the beach ; and, as the billows rolled and re- 
tired, and the sandy channels creased themselves every 
moment anew, I said to him what I here repeat, that 
no miracle or prophecy, no ancient promise or written 
text, but the trust in God coming to the heart in a 
whisper from his work, is my token of immortality. 



XVI. 

HOPE. 

A PERFECT human spirit would have no argu- 
ment about a future lot. Evidences of immor- 
tality could be no more sought by it than by an angel. 
When we project our thought to the place in the 
ground where our flesh shall lie, or query what is for 
us beyond, we have fallen from grace and lost the 
everlasting present of duty and joy. God might as 
well doubt his continuance as we ours, when in com- 
munion with him. But this height is so rare and 
momentary in the best souls, the question of destiny 
cannot be escaped. The boy I met, crying because 
he did not know where his father was, expressed an 
anxiety wide as the world about vanished friends. No 
question but something, every thing some way, must 
last. The knowledge and love that light and kindle 
these chambers of the breast will blaze on. But will 
it be our light and knowledge when the walls are 
taken down ? or will the occupant be crushed, like 
those islanders of St. Thomas under the ruins the 
hurricane made of their abodes ? We are tenants at 
will, liable any moment to be served with a notice to 
quit ; living some of us in old mansions which, as Mr. 



HOPE. 363 

Jefferson said of himself, the owner refuses to repair. 
What a spectacle ! mankind marching up, rank after 
rank ; each generation, as it crosses the stage, taking 
a look at the magnificent picture, then passing on to 
give place to the next ; the world a great inn, and 
every soul a guest at the table, well fed and waited on, 
but resigning his chair to the coming traveller ; as the 
Northman said, like a bird flying in at one window, 
and out at the other, — from darkness to darkness. 
As a visitor of Titian's paintings said, it seems as 
if we were the shadows. Is matter solid, and spirit 
the reflection it casts? That is an absurdity to 
thought. 

But what proof of immortality? None, we must 
confess, but the hope. Elijah's ascension in the 
chariot of fire, if such a spectacle astonished Elisha ; 
Enoch's translation, if God took him, sending no angel 
of death ; Christ's raising of Lazarus, or his own resur- 
rection, — were no assurance. I see many persons 
counted worthy of things I do not attain ; and some 
of the ancients held to the immortality of great souls, 
but not of common people. The ghosts, which my 
friends the Spiritualists tell me of, do not show them- 
selves to me ; and, if they did, they might cross where 
I should slip. 

I fall back on my Hope. No demonstration, — only 
a hope? That is all ; but what is that? By whom is 
that candle lit that sends its beams so far? Who put 
it into my head that I am going to outlive my body, 
outshine the stars with my eyes, and be when the 
heavens are no more? No mortal did it. I did it not 
myself. What hand dropped in the human bosom the 



364 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

seed of this blossom of faith, fairer than from the sod 
of any sepulchre? My Hope is my argument. It is 
a note of hand which needs no indorser, which the 
drawer will pay though the name of never a prophet 
were written on the back. My constitution to aspire 
to endless being is evidence which no miracle can 
strengthen. It is a prophecy Job or Jesus cannot add 
to, though their lamp carried through the inward crypts 
help me to read the Maker's record. Make out hope 
as part of your nature, — no accident or whim, but an 
angel He despatched, — and the case is won. A man 
is indicted at the law for exciting expectations he did 
not fulfil. That is a crime God does not commit. I 
saw the remains of a dear mother borne to tiieir rest. 
Silently the coffin was lowered. No gravel from 
sexton's spade rattled on the lid. No burial-service 
was said at the grave. Heaps of flowers from hands 
of mourning friends dropped after, with showers of 
tears to keep them alive a little longer above the more 
precious human flower fading away. Hope soared 
over-head to say, only the broken vase where it had 
bloomed was there, like that which, when you trans- 
plant, you cast away. The real flower was in an- 
other garden. A deceiver, a lying spirit is it, sent 
only to tantalize, torment, and disappoint? Then 
talk no longer of the God of hope, but let Deity and 
immortality go together, and introduce a new worship 
of the demon of despair. 

Hope is the parent of faith. I believe in the Heaven 
I am made to forecast, whose horoscope no human 
hand constructed. Marius the Roman general medi- 
tates among the ruins of Carthage. Amid what 



HOPE. 365 

wrecks human hope will sitl The soul, distressed 
and afflicted, impoverished and bereaved, yet never 
surrenders, but yearns and longs and anticipates still. 
God cannot shake it off, smite and buffet it as he will. 
It takes sides with him against itself. David from 
his depths cries out, "It is good that I have been 
afflicted ; " and in an old Bible I have read the pen- 
cilling of one in sore grief against his text : " With 
my whole heart I acknowledge this." What is it that 
accepts misery from the Most High, defends the Provi- 
dence that inflicts its woes, espouses its chastiser's 
cause, purges itself in the pit of its misery of all con- 
tempt of his commands, and makes its agonies the 
beams and rafters of the triumph it builds? It is an 
immortal principle. It is an indestructible essence. 
It is part and parcel of the Divinity it adores. It can 
no more die than he can. It needs no more insurance 
of life than its author does. Prove its title? It is 
proof itself of all things else. It is substantive, and 
every thing adjective beside. It is the kingdom all 
things will be added to. " My mind a kingdom is," 
pass popedoms and empires and temporalities as they 
will. 

But this is not argument ; it is ecstasy. What is 
ecstasy? An uplifting to some position above our 
usual stand. We always see more, as we get up 
higher on a tower or hill. On yonder cape, whose 
name of Ann some love of woman gave, I have been 
amazed at revelations of beauty, from rising forty or 
fifty feet into the air : forests in the dim horizon, 
intervales stretching along the banks of streams, and 
the far-off Atlantic swell and roll girdling with foam 



366 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

the isles. It is an ecstasy to be on Mount Washington 
or Mont Blanc : it extends the view. Some years 
ago, I sailed with some friends to pick up that little 
pin on the floor of the deep, — the island of Fayal. 
As we surmised from observations of the sun that we 
were nearing the latitude where it is laid down, there 
was debate whether a vague cloudy line we saw in 
the distance was land or mist. But a great surge 
tossing the vessel brought out plainly the hump 
of vineyards washed with breakers and laced with 
streams, to our exclamation of unanimous joy. So 
from the surge of feeling we may descry the heavenly 
shore, hid from the level survey of common-place life. 
It is no halcyon, but a stormy, sea that lifts us to the 
vision. Not on the bright glassy surface of our pros- 
perity, but on the sullen, heaving tide of sorrow, shall 
v^e behold the port we would make. Gray weather 
softens the landscape, and assists the sight. It was 
said of England, she imagines she sees further on 
a cloudy, threatening day than with all clear. So 
through gloom we discern glory. The storm throws 
up the sea-weed to enrich the land. Foul weather 
is needed to make the fair fruitful. The bolt that 
shatters your roof directs your eye upward. The 
Almighty blesses us with menace as with promise. 
When our children, the heirs we hoped to leave our 
lodging to, are carried dead from its door, we seek a 
city that hath foundations ; for we, too, on our own 
thresholds must turn our back, and, able to walk no 
more, be led and lowered through the same low gate- 
way. 

No argument, but the operation of the human mind, 



HOPE. 367 

the divine order of mortal life and the anticipation 
our Creator stands sponsor for, — of immortality. 

But the trial is to dissociate the spirit from the 
body ; which we keep unburied long as we can, and 
but for the offence would keep for ever. Does the 
objection to incremation arise from an apprehension 
that from the deeper hurt of fire the mortal figure may 
not be restored? We cannot separate our idea of 
spirit, in God or man, from form. We understand, 
the form must pass. But it has been the tabernacle 
of the mind. Some celestial form corresponds to it, 
the faintest earthly likeness to which our piety would 
cherish, till Nature, in whose lap we lay it, resolve it 
into mother dust. Something of the familiar appear- 
ance and expression of our beloved must go up, for 
us to know them by, when our turn comes. Father 
Taylor said, when told he was going among the an- 
gels : '•^ Folks better than angels." But angels are 
folks. An aged woman objected to dying, and going 
where she was not acquainted. Shall we not find 
our acquaintance there? 

Beauty and power reside not in the grosser masses, 
but the finer elements, — the atoms and rays, the 
undulations and electric streams. Whoever credits 
God as being can trust his provision of fit frame for 
the picture and living image of his creation, when the 
coarse setting of clay cracks and falls. There is in 
death, as the Psalmist says, a shadow ; but through 
tliat alone the vista shines. Darkness is the condi- 
tion of lustre. It is the great Painter's background. 
Sadness has brightness which no hilarity can show. 
There is a flower, though growing in gloomy places. 



368 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

the most brilliant that blossoms in our woods, which 
is yet not gay, — not for merry-making. No maiden 
would wear it in her hair at the party for a dance, 
or use it for a wedding-favor, or put it, like a rose 
or lily, in her breast. In its scarlet or crimson leaf 
is a purple tinge, which as we gaze may draw a tear. 
But its shape and color outgrace in the damp pool all 
the bloom of the garden. It- is the Cardinal Flower, 
deserving its princely name, as an emblem of that 
hope which springs so splendid in the shady spots of 
our fortune and dim recesses of the heart. 

To build immortality on any bodily resurrection is 
a mistake. The ascension of Christ's mortal flesh to 
eternal glory, what a monstrous conception which 
Unitarian and Trinitarian still hold, with the logical 
inference that the flesh of all his followers out of cor- 
ruption shall rise ! In Indiana, an aeronaut, missing 
his seat, but clinging to the cords of his balloon, rose 
a mile into the air, and then, exhausted, fell to the 
ground. All bodily rising must end in fall. Not so 
the good father, not so the dear child, will rise. Risen 
they have, and gone forth ; leaving, like Jesus, the 
linen garments, as the roused sleeper does his bed- 
clothes behind. 

Meantime how fruitless the quarrel about dialectic 
names ! Intuition, consciousness, demonstration and 
revelation, are the correlation of one proof, and end in 
one sense of continuance. Science bids us wait for it 
to decide if the future life be a fact. But that " fell 
Serjeant, death," will not wait. We cannot postpone 
the coffin and the grave. Shall the question of destiny 
lie on the table to give posterity a monopoly of solace ? 



HOPE. 369 

Immortality as an external conclusion were but a 
mortal affair. Its definition is knowledge inherent 
in the soul. What does it consist in but our com- 
munity with God? Were our nature an island, or 
planet rolling outside, no space could be certified in 
his eternity. But if he is our Common, we can be 
conscious of him as the lower animals are of us. 
When the birds altered the style of their nests to 
accommodate themselves to the settlement of New 
England, were they not conscious of the immigrants? 
'' My horse understands me. If I do not pat him, as 
usual, when I go into the barn, he is mortified, and 
hangs his head." The centaur was no monster, but 
a cordial figure of man and horse in sympathy. There 
is no such thing as boundary. Man is a bridge. 
What is the angel that stood one foot on the sea and 
one on the land, but our nature arching the stream 
of time, and uniting the cherub with the beast ; finding 
that not its degradation, but dignity, is in its mighty 
span. Our family tree has its roots in the ground and 
boughs in the heavens ; and our journey is no declivity 
from paradise, but up from the savage that grovels 
to the seraph that sings. Not alone, as Wordsworth 
tells, in childhood are we 

"Moving about in worlds unrealized." 

Evermore, as grown men, we converse with things 
that pass understanding. 

But, if conscious of divinity, is it not absurd to say 
conscious of immortality, — that is, of some thing yet 
to come ? I answer : we are conscious of durability 
as a quality, if not of future duration as a fact. The 

24 



370 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

date of a century-old structure is implied in the so- 
lidity of the work. Why is a gem so precious? See 
the greedy diggers rush to South Africa for diamonds ! 
What makes for a diamond the rate of valuation? 
Not only the splendor and the brilliant polish the 
stone will take, but the property of hardness, to hold 
for ages the glittering angles unworn. How without 
stain or fracture it goes from one crown and tiara and 
empire to another, while king and queen and lord 
and pope pass ! It is drawn sparkling as ever from 
the thousandth finger, where love and fealty put it, 
and triumphs over the ashes of corse and shroud, ages 
without end. Shall its composition and not the 
mind's endure? Is our perception or affection, in 
identity with its supernal object, of texture less tough? 
In my boyhood I bought a silver pencil ; and, looking 
at the screw, asked the Swedenborgian jeweller if it 
would wear out. " Every thing," he said, " material 
will." But will ideas and principles? or the soul they 
are espoused by? or any one that dies for them? 
" Lasting " the maker calls a certain kind of cloth : 
what is everlasting? Do we call God so because we 
have applied any measure to liim ? No ; but because 
the absoluteness of his being defies time. Sounding 
it, we lose our sinker in the sea. 

What gracious human sentiment can be gauged? 
The Danube, forcing its way through the hills, hints 
the flowing charity that overcomes and wears away 
our flinty creeds. Mr. Huxley says, it is not the land 
that is solid, but the sea holding its level, while that 
of the earth shifts every year. So generous feeling 
outlives the hardest dogma. Chronology of world or 



HOPE. 371 

mind follows reality like a waiter or shadow. The 
French name a man's constitutional limit his viability^ 
as Mr. Weston's is the time he can keep on his legs. 
What is the viability of the spirit ? Can it be dead t 
It w^ere a contradiction ! The noble mind believes in 
destiny, and admits no doom. David says, God will 
not suffer his holy one to see corruption. Goethe 
thinks his fidelity entitles him to another body. 
Vaughan feels, — 

" Through all this fleshly dress, / 

Bright shoots of everlastingness." 

Jesus declares, " He that will lose his life shall save 
it ; " and tells his Father, " Now come I to thee." 
Friends, taken from flood or fire, are found locked in 
each other's arms : was that quenched or burnt which 
prompted the last embrace.? The scholar's manu- 
scripts lie like white thunder round him, — a concen- 
tric battery against old forts of error and sin : shall 
the moral cannoneer perish? The spotless boy could 
remember nothing to repent of, but that he had once 
whistled on the stairs when his grandmother was 
sick : is that tender conscience extinct ? The heart 
will bleed. As we say of a flesh wound, let it bleed, 
and so not fester ! But its love abides. 

My friend says he cannot credit immortality : it is 
too wonderful. I tell him I am wonder-struck here ! 
Once in, nothing can amaze me. I never expect to 
be so much astonished again, though all the hier- 
archies of heaven deploy in my sight. You do not 
believe.? Then you do not. It is a sad fact. So 
much the worse for you ! Drawing the hand over the 



372 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

skin or hair in some persons fetches the electric spark. 
Will some wiseacre doubt the statement, because it is 
not noticed or verified in other persons? Faith is 
worth somewhat as a characteristic, and it is an attri- 
bute of the noblest natures, — of Plato and Socrates, 
Newton and Milton, Jesus and Paul, — and to be re- 
spected as of so much value, just as to be ductile or 
volatile is an attribute of price in any mineral or metal. 

But people have believed all sorts of things : witches, 
fairies, apparitions, demons, possessions and obses- 
sions ; visions of heaven and hell and distant transac- 
tions on earth, like the Swedish seer's ; presentiments, 
premonitions, and spiritual communications. Belief 
is nothing ! But, I ask, from no beauty did all these 
shadows fall ? Justify your domestic love, and I will 
vindicate my divine confidence. Science is substantial. 
But the soul's a|Dprehension of rectitude is as exact as 
of arithmetical numbers or geometrical lines. 

We must, say some Free Religionists, be willing to 
sacrifice the belief in God and Immortality on the 
altar of truth. What is truth, but the very thing you 
are thus ready, if required, to sacrifice on its shrine ! 
If God or the soul be not truth, we have lost the 
definition ; and, in default of worship of the Spirit, 
we make an idol of our lexicon, as if verity and Div- 
init}^ were two things. There are, indeed, inveterate 
or congenital deniers. So there are deaf-mutes, per- 
sons born blind, and men with no music in their souls. 
But they are wanting in themselves who think they 
have measured the realm of reality with their indi- 
vidual rod and chain. Unbelief is lack of character. 
We hear how noble unbelievers are. A sceptic may 



HOPE. 373 

be honest and kind in exchanges and tokens of friend- 
ship and trade. If that be all, let one cloth cover 
body and soul ! But if aspiration for excellence opens 
and dawns into a perfection, whose standard dwarfs 
every example and shames all biography, faith in 
opportunity to realize our ideal is part of virtue. I 
have heard persons profess no repugnance to annihila- 
tion. They could hardly have had such an ideal. 
They lacked the fiery spark in Jesus which said, *•' I 
have power to lay down my life, and power to take it 
again." 

Faith seems, in the best men, no permanent state, 
but a temporary exaltation or shifting mood. But, 
though the clouds close in, one perception of the 
celestial land is, for evidence, enough. At Rhigi or 
Mount Washington, travellers wait for weeks for a 
good ascent. Hundreds toil to the top, in the rack 
and haze, to miss the panorama from the peak. But 
against all failures, holds the view of those whose eye- 
sight reaches from the summit to the shining lake or 
the rolling sea. So, when a friend, going, leaves a 
track of light across the dark valley and an open door 
into upper rest, the impossibility, in your vision, of 
doubt is a recollection for faith to live on for ever. 

The use of prophets is to make the assurance of 
such beholding accepted by the unbelieving world. 
" I am the resurrection and the life : " of every burial- 
service, from the Charles to the Rhone, such words 
are the balm. One shaft of darkness in Gethsemane 
across the blazing sun proves Jesus to be a man and 
our model. " Father, forgive them ; for they know 
not what they do : '' was this a piece of sentimental 



374 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

acting, from a deluded tongue, that found no hospi- 
table ear? I can entertain your scholarly doubts 
about manuscripts and versions, and your scientific 
balking at a blasted fig-tree or multiplied fishes and 
loaves. But experience was mother of that record ! 
Virtue composed that story. That language w^as ut- 
tered and heard. In some blind alley or Ishmaelite 
pit, it may prove our register. 

Life has been called a tragedy ; but triumph is the 
close. No dirge, but a jubilee, for that new begin- 
ning out of the seeming end ! Such faith is born of 
that sympathetic imagination which is the kindler 
of love, solvent of pride, secret door of inspiration, 
crown of beauty, consummation of excellence, com- 
mon benediction and boon. When Jesus or his dis- 
ciple gives up life, is it the same life vi^hich he saves? 
No : sacrifice of the meaner feeds the grander self. 
That is no accident for death to sweep away. We 
have all some acquaintance with that glorious stranger, 
which has warrant in us to survive every earthly show. 

Is this a purely human property, no spark of which 
glimmers in the beast? Although the parallelism of 
the human and animal brain hints rudimentary corre- 
spondence of mind, vast difference of degree seems 
tantamount to diversity of kind. Yet what likenesses 
exist ! A dog defends his master's property with his 
own life ; yet who thinks it deserves the name of de- 
votion? Would you be safe from the mastiff* at the 
gate? let him see you speak on good terms with 
the owner, and the understanding is quick as light. 
The walrus intervenes with her body between her 
offspring and the hunter's spear. If the huTuan 



HOPE. 375 

reaches the three hundred and sixtieth, the animal act 
touches, at least, the first degree of the same round. 
If there are bestial hints of displays like Peter's in 
the dungeon, Christ's on the cross, and Brown's on 
the scaffold, of what inconceivable glories are these 
latter the germs? Nor need we search for them afar. 
Do we not see, in daily experience, what nothing in 
history can surpass? " Two things," says Kant, " are 
sublime, — conscience and the stars." I lately beheld 
a soul pass with majesty before which the heavens 
shrink ; when dying was the thing to do, laying down 
earthly things with a smile so sunny, death was a fly- 
ing shadow, till the chamber became a place for taber- 
nacles. There was a babe that must go to heaven to 
know its mother, and the mother was only concerned 
nobody should think her babe the cause of her disease, 
and could serenely say. Beautiful! to the phantom 
from the tomb, and declare, God makes no mistake. 
Why wonder how Stephen's face shone as it were an 
angel ! This is to be sick and die to some purpose. 
Many flowers on the coffin : I could but see the one 
in it. 

We ask for evidences of faith. Faith is the evi- 
dence. It shows how the habit of God's presence 
heals and lifts the soul, as perpetual atmosphere does 
the body. He is our native air. Whatever thing or 
person beneath him we rest in is our fetish. In the 
noblest mortals, beauty comes and goes. Be any 
man's devotee, and your fondness will be the cloak 
of self-seeking. Our idolatry of Jesus makes him the 
frame in which our own portrait is set ! The only 
escape from selfish conceit is spiritual worship. 



37^ RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Faith is moral. Character is the office where it is 
insured. It is not possible to think of any one as dead 
who has shown great qualities. Will' it be an inter- 
polation to tell of a nobleman by nature, who w^as for 
thirty years United States consul at Fayal ? How vivid 
the picture to me still' of his coming off in his boat, 
on the rough waters of the harborless Azores, to take 
to his hospitable house a sea-worn sick man, and treat 
him with the double bounty of his ample board and 
of his sympathy with free thought in religion ! How 
the proper fruit of the tree of liberty appeared in his 
goodness to many an invalid ; in his open purse to the 
poor of the island ; in his equal courtesy to humble 
Portuguese or proud Englishman ; in his lavished re- 
sources in time of famine ; in his creation for the 
natives of a profitable trade at his own risk ; and in 
the beauty his art added to Nature in his almost match- 
less garden, set over volcanic ground in the azure sea ! 
In what other soil must there not be food and blossom 
for him now? Is nothing immortal in mortal person 
and name? or has Dabney found King, who once 
found him, over-sea? Are the believers and lovers a 
joint-stock company that have failed? and is all our 
confidence in sacred story frail as the printed verse 
that fades or is blown away ? No : the soul but rests 
on some brave prophetic sentence, as a sea-bird for a 
moment on the ground-swell, till ready for its instinc- 
tive flight. 

Only what is pure is immortal. Love lives, and 
veng-eance dies. Yonder Somerville hill shows how 
Romanist and Rationalist agree at last that fine houses, 
better than charred and mouldering walls, adorn the 



HOPE. 



377 



summit where the Catholic convent was burnt by a 
Protestant mob. I shall live while I can grow. 
Progress is the law. Why reproach me for not saying 
still what I said thirty years ago ? Is my anchorage 
and mortgage in the past? There is no such idolater 
as memory. Paul is anxious especially that Timothy 
should fetch his parchments ; but we never hear of 
them afterwards. He must have forgot his notes, 
after all ! I write and preach my sermons with heart- 
beats and tears ; and, after a few years, send them 
by the thousand, without compunction, to the paper- 
mill. Our brother, with admirable and instructive 
industry, expounds the great systems that have pre- 
vailed of religious belief. A step forward beyond 
them all must we not take.^ What the age is with 
child of, who in words shall tell ? But the Jews had 
no monopoly of messiahs : we, too, ever expect a 
Saviour's birth. We cannot abide in any letter or 
rite. Does the Grand Army of the Republic worship 
the flag, or the liberty and reunion it means ? 

But the executive department must not be over- 
looked. We cannot stop with vision. Not only the 
discoverer, the organizer too of principles deserves 
our honor ; and the seer waits on the reformer. How 
secure unity without compromise, and co-action with- 
out coercion? We would get the flock along, and 
keep the flock together. This is the problem for the 
church, a.s it was to Abraham Lincoln, shepherd of 
States. No Radicalism alone can solve it. It requires 
consummate wisdom combined with clear sight. On 
ethics of concession we subsist. We would not use 
what a statesman called his foolometei'. Yet a com- 



378 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

pensation pendulum keeps the best time ; and truth 
for us is not absolute, but a relation. It is an atone- 
ment of opposites. It is a reduction of discords 
to harmony. It is fulfilment of those conditions of 
social solidarity by which men cohere and move on. 
Yet the honest word is a main factor, — a term that 
in the sum of human welfare never disappears. It 
is everlastings — finished in no book. 

Utterance, as unreserved as any Indian eloquence, 
is among the grounds of that hope which regards not 
only individual persistence, but the prospects of man- 
kind. Our definition of immortality runs on the line 
of earthly fortunes, and is not restricted to a heavenly 
bliss. Whatever notions cannot be converted to prac- 
tical benefit, with a smile let us leave. The brain in 
some brings forth empty wind. It is a bank that 
passes its dividend, or declares one not of sterling 
value, but worthless stock. Yet let us be slow to pro- 
nounce any speculation barren I In a ship-yard the 
straight timber is good for masts and yards ; but 
the crooked serves for knees and joints, and many a 
stick lies for years before it comes into play. Thought, 
fresh as it is free, is not only building material, but 
motive power. How many factories buzz and spin 
in Great Britain to contribute tools for every useful 
art wider than her drum-beat round the globe ! But 
the realm fears the giving out of her coal-beds. Then 
how mill and maker, pilot and steamer, would be at a 
loss ! The inaster with sailing directions for the ship 
of Union, which Longfellow sings, and the stoker at 
the moral furnace, would find their occupation gone, 
should the mines of wisdom fail, or cease to be 



HOPE. 379 

wrought with new yield for the need of every 
year. 

The assumption that our precedents suffice, — that 
all truth is laid down, and we have but to go to the 
huge cellar of past revelation for food and fuel to feed 
and warm all generations " to the last syllable of re- 
corded time," — the exigencies of society perpetually 
refute. The Bible is a mighty bin ; but it gives out, 
and we are forced to resort to new growth. I re- 
cited to a reverent church Paul's chapter to the Cor- 
inthians on the relations of men and women. In a 
quite different way from Christ's hearers, they were 
astonished at the doctrine. Some admired my cour- 
age ; some suspected irony ; and some said the minister 
might have made a better selection. But the apostle 
meant well enough ! Corinth, with all its Greek pol- 
ish, was a loose place. Men kept their hats on in 
meeting, and got drunk at the Lord's Supper ; while 
women took off their bonnets, and let down their 
hair. Paul acted as police. The absurdity is, on the 
ground of verbal inspiration, to make his text an ever- 
lasting canon, when the reasons are so shallow ; his 
major premise being but the old fable of woman's 
formation from the man, whom anatomy finds never 
to have missed the rib out of which she was made ! 
What shall we say of his not suffering a woman to 
teach, when women are the best teachers in all the 
Sunday schools in Christendom ? Would not some 
very orthodox and conservative folk be discomposed, 
if his decrees about long hair in men, and plaited 
hair, pearls, gold, and costly array in women, were 
enforced by beadles on the spot in a religious com- 



380 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

pany, like a prohibitory law, or Louis Napoleon's or- 
ders, by his instruments in the coup d'etat? The 
executives would have their hands full, and find them- 
selves in business, so shearing either Episcopal or 
Methodist flocks! 

Modern science, scholarship, and common sense 
command that the Bible be criticised as well as ex- 
plained. Does it hold so many rations, one for every 
day, — as the frontier-woman seemed to think, when 
she told the colporteur she did not know she was so 
near out of it, bringing to the door a torn leaf. No : 
there must be more Bible, and better than some of 
that we have ! The Romanists, wiser than the Protest- 
ants, affirm that the truth within sacred lids needs the 
supplement of the living voice of the Church, from 
which it came. 

The worst of bibliolatry is its strain on clerical 
candor ; for no man or minister, however he pretend, 
can practise as he preaches any theory of the omnis- 
cience of the written word. The case is kept on foot 
by the old policy, of one doctrine of the philosopher 
for the people, and another for his peers, — one view 
in the study, and a different in the desk ; on epistolary 
authority, meat for men, and milk for babes. How 
condescending, in educated men, to say, " You must 
give according to men's capacity to receive ! " So 
we might, were men and women infants in these 
days. But many of them, reading and reflecting, 
know more than the priests. The minister has not 
before him so many narrow-necked bottles, into which 
to pour a little of his wondrous information with care. 
He will not find his best thoughts so premature as he 



HOPE. 381 

fears ! The plate is prepared for his finest photo- 
graphy. His locomotive is not so much ahead of the 
train. We will excuse him from the benevolent con- 
ceit that he has convictions about the nature of God 
or origin of man, for which the community of intelli- 
gence, that bears him up as a crest-wave on a ground- 
swell, is not ready. 

The teacher's is a threefold qualification, — of 
intelligence, sincerity, and love. But how is it pos- 
sible to hold as final the holy writ that allows slavery, 
polygamy, retaliatory capital punishment, fighting be- 
cause God is a man of war, or deep draughts of mirac- 
ulous wine at a wedding ; and decrees subjection of 
woman to man, because of his being as superior to 
her, as Christ to a common person, or God to Christ.'' 
The letter is a block, drawback, and drag to the most 
needful reforms. How much wire-drawn subtilty 
is used to prove that it confines and exhausts the 
spirit nevertheless ! We lie for our sect, for our 
party, despite the prophetic warning not to speak 
deceitfully for God or what we account his word. 
Woman's rights men and women, with disingenuous 
ingenuity, try to argue the hard texts of the Old and 
New Testament into consistency with their views. 
So the Northern pulpit labored to prove that Hebrew 
slavery did not justify American or any other. The 
advocates of abstinence will have it that the wine 
made at Cana was not intoxicating ; while those who 
consider the extreme penalty of the law as legal 
murder explain away the text in Genesis from a 
statute to a circumstance ; and the non-resistants balk 
at Psalms and Chronicles, and have to make a piece 



383 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

of rhetoric, in Christ's mouth, of the two swords 
unsheathed and shining in his eyes ! When a woman 
undertook to speak in a late Prohibitory Convention, 
in Boston, the Baptist Boanerges of the cause resisted 
her as an infidel. Who would have thought Paul's 
verse about not suffering a woman to teach would, 
like a bomb-shell of long range over land and sea, fall 
and explode in Tremont Temple? How much of the 
blood in our Civil War flowed from a Southern super- 
stitious ministry's sincere defence of the system of 
bondage on Scriptural grounds ! Ten thousand teach- 
ers were not pure hypocrites. Do not half the human 
race likewise suffer prejudice of their claims to the use 
of their own persons and property and the exercise of 
social and civil rights .f' 

Doubtless some act on the Jesuit principle of reserve. 
Many clergymen, too well instructed to accept the 
old letter as decisive of the new questions, and fearing 
to make trouble with their creeds and congregations, 
take up other themes, let the moot points go. They are 
guilty, if not of false witness, yet of the crime called 
sufpressio7t of the truth. " I am very careful," said 
a preacher, " not to tell any lies." So he avoided 
the offence of being a Radical. But was he settled 
simply not to tell lies? Did he keep his ordination 
oath of telling the whole truth? How many cowards 
there are in the priest's order of Melchisedec, be they 
called orthodox or liberal, it is no satisfaction, but a 
grief and shame to think. 

Only one position is tenable. All these matters 
of reform which stir the public mind at the pres- 
ent day, however illustrated from profane or sacred 



HOPE. 



383 



history, must be argued on their own merits at the 
tribunal of reason, not of Moses or Paul. I am not 
of those who think alcohol, under all circumstances, a 
poison, and never a medicine ; but I would not have 
the extremists in Temperance embarrassed with an 
ancient miracle and a text. Debate the sumptuary 
law in the modern light, and God defend the right ! 
What hypocrisy is generated otherwise ! At a great 
meeting of a society of doctors, many years ago, the 
leader and president got a unanimous vote that every 
drop of ardent spirits was in the human system a 
bane : whereupon one member rose and asked if they, 
all preparing medicines with alcohol, were not, in the 
extravagance of their statement, presenting themselves 
as a pack of fools and knaves. Water is put for wine 
on some communion-boards. May not the element as 
well be dispensed with, when it comes to that? A 
form is destroyed when it is changed. How else can 
this momentous cause of Temperance be promoted 
than with Truth, from which no enterprise of phi- 
lanthropy will bear to be divorced ? But all Scripture 
is not truth. So from such as find no deeper basis, 
and cannot themselves build on the same foundation 
with apostles and prophets, instead of building on 
them, we have abundance of double-dealing and spe- 
cial pleas. The Devil, in the old proverb, can quote 
Scripture : is it not because he has tried his hand in. 
making some? Surely, cruelty to the Canaanites and . 
oppression of the children of Ham were among his 
texts ! Had our construction of the Book but anti- 
quarian interest, we might let men sleep in their prej- 
udice. But it touches every imminent issue and live 



384 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

question of the day. The pulpif s sin of reservation 
is a projectile of pure insult to the people. The prince 
of the virtues is the noble apostle's own, — to speak 
with all boldness as we ought. 

The old theology does not atone for its gloom by 
moral effect. Whatever reason it had for being, it has 
for now ceasing to be. Under its existing frame its 
heart is eaten out. It is what Sherman called the 
South, — a shell. No Genevan or Florentine or 
Swedenborgian or Miltonic genius can keep hell dis- 
tinct from heaven, or the Devil as a rival of God. It 
has been said by liberal critics that a grain of Cal- 
vinism does not hurt the flavor of the bread, and that 
it has under its ugly look a musical soul. It sang 
once of civil freedom, which has nobler minstrels 
now ; but not a note any longer of spiritual truth. 
It has lost its voice ! In a rude age it made God felt 
as an iron power ; and out of its shadow a glory came 
like the sunrise from the storm-cloud whose spent fury 
settles in the East ; but the Orient for the coming day 
is a more generous faith that absorbs its lurid lustre, 
as I saw the ascending sun take all the grim and 
ruddy pomp out of the vaporous horizon to itself. 
Nursed on the unadulterated diet of the New-England 
creed fifty years ago, may one not be a better witness 
than an observer whose cradle lay inside the liberal 
fold? Imagination is quick to make of the present 
writer a boy, not suffered to leave the close parlor on 
the Sabbath, though sunshine and green field so in- 
vited him as to make it a sore prison, — save to walk 
straight to the church, whose clamor of denounce- 
ment, without one gentle strain of nature, still rings in 



HOPE. 385 

his ear. Those who fainted in the ill-ventilated 
building, he thought, were borne out to be judged. 
In his solitary walks, in his seventh year, he had be- 
gun to hang his head ; and remembers how for hours 
he would repeat the one sentence, " God be merciful 
to one a sinner ; " though he wondered what the guilt 
was that should forbid him to lift his eyes to heaven, 
and had eclipsed the beauty of the world. 

Too much has been put between the soul and its 
Author. Comfort is too far to seek in Judaea. We 
want our own Immanuel, God with us. No imported 
can equal an indigenous faith. The soul in its 
extremity must have immediate help. No circum- 
locution avails like the direct whisper. Our hope 
beyond the dead-line is no letter, promise, miracle, 
or bodily rising, but trust in the Power that made 
us. If my life is of no consequence to him, it is of 
none to me. What is best, he will do, and I accept. 
No ticket of vicarious redeeming in my hand, no self- 
salvation, no insurance against accidents on the road ; 
but such acceptance is all my immortality,. present and 
to come. The property is his to reinvest or throw 
away. This is the rising faith with Internationals of 
the Spirit ! The ecclesiastic bar loses its terror. Con- 
science is a tribunal that dispenses better justice. The 
assizes are no longer remote, beyond the sound of 
trumpets and the quickening of a million generations* 
dust. The Judge standeth at the door. God's bench 
is the human mind. When the consul said to the 
Portuguese priest, "Why do you, knowing better, 
still apply the Romish scheme ? " the priest answered, 
" C'est mon metier," — it is my trade ! But religion, 

25 



386 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

as a business and function, must yield to vision of the 
fact. 

Every thinker has his prospect of improvement for 
the human race. We make our prophetic sketch. So 
it will be, we say, in politics, society, worship, or 
affairs ; " but we shall not live to see the day ! " Dr. 
Franklin wished to come back, after some ages, and 
look on the renovated world. Perhaps he does, and 
we shall, in a way unlike his fancy. This anticipa- 
tion of earthly progress is token of divine destiny. 
Meantime how pleasant to contemplate the renewing 
force ! After the bitter week, that had brought the 
earth near to zero, I went to Gale's Point, on the coast. 
The broad harbor between the headlands was frozen to 
the channel, and resisted the tide that crunched against 
the encroaching ice. Down the slope of the land 
flowed the image of an arrested cataract of water, 
hard as the congealed masses in which the northern 
whalers met their fate. But where this stiffened tor- 
rent started was a living spring, lifting its sandy 
columns as it bubbled noiseless from the earth, to keep 
its surface soft and smooth as a summer breath. It 
told the gentle, resistless persistence of a higher life 
than its own. Death is before us. But what an 
advantage for them who have it behind ! Their posi- 
tion we shall find no marvel, but natural as the dawn 
when it shall become ours. 

Meantime let us discuss radical problems without 
fear. Religion depends not on the institutions she 
forms. Were all bibles and churches swept away, 
she would spring immortal ; as out of the burnt forests 
of Wisconsin time is bringing other trees, perhaps ot 



HOPE. 387 

nobler growth. Orthodoxy must show us better fruit, 
in our neighbors and their children, before the de- 
moralization charged on Liberality will stir any alarm. 
Looking back at the long line in my own Church, how 
the names of Hooper, Mayhew^, Howard, and Lowell 
shine to signify no novelty in free thought and inde- 
pendent speech ! But to make an idol even of liberty 
is as narrow as it is profane. Let our inspiration be 
wrought into the social body, which is our incarnate 
nature and common flesh. Every talent and human 
element we need. Great expectations should they 
have, who number scholars like Martineau and Hedge, 
organizers like Bellows and Hale, and mediators like 
Collyer and Clarke. There may be room for whatever 
thoughts are here repeated, because men and ideas are 
alike dear. 

All powers, in all ways, however diverse or con- 
trary, compose the resultant harmony. The ground 
of fellowship is reverence. Fun or humor to make 
light of things has its place ; but a mere entertainer is 
a low character. I thought it great praise when my 
friend called Jared Sparks a serious man. The child 
in Willis's poem is " tired of play ; " and how weary 
we get of those who spoil conversation and insult our 
convictions with their untimely wit, turn on our talk 
the jet of water instead of flame, or would make fire- 
works for amusement of all the light and heat of the 
soul ; and, when the dove of the Holy Ghost is just 
hovering to light, shoot it with a jest ! They must 
worship, who would commune. Why cannot those 
two persons abide each other? They belong to the 
same church, neighborhood, and social circle ; they 



388 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

dress with equal elegance ; they sit side by side at the 
concert or play ; they drive hard after each other over 
the fashionable road, but cannot set their horses to- 
gether. What is the foil to a hundred sympathies of 
interest, pursuit, and taste? What these human pith- 
balls are mutually repelled by is the same electricity 
of self-conceit ! They keep each other at such a re- 
spectful distance, because they have no meeting-place 
in God. Swift said Addison was very '' civil," after 
his famous satire on him under the title of Atticus. 
What can have alienated your old friend? Your 
vanity or his ! Self-pronunciation is secession : ambi- 
tion to lead is disunion. Cassar and Antony, Octavia 
and Cleopatra, could not inhabit one sphere. How 
many seek to king or queen it, to set the fashion, 
captain the troop, or champion the ring, like the 
as finely dressed and feathered cock of the walk ! 
They grind each other to pieces with identical sharp 
corners, that can find no counterpart, and are walk- 
ing figures of irony on their own several pretence ! 
Chanticleer wishes his note to resound without reply. 
O friends, love and serve together the Infinite Being 
and Beauty ; and, in what smooth gear, soft as a 
psalm, you would run ! " Behold, he prayeth," was 
reason enough for Ananias to visit Saul, or Channing 
to honor Rammohan Roy, or Dean Stanley to em- 
brace Chunder Sen. When we learn that Christ's 
ascension was a daily habit, and no bodily act, we 
shall understand that his board is not spread for a pri- 
vate entertainment ; and none, revering his character, 
can by any master of ceremonies be driven from his 
feast. The Ideal, that floated over him, can lift us 



HOPE. 389 

out of sight of all outward rising. The line of beauty, 
once discovered, is discovered for ever ; and how he kept 
that faultless curve ! He held Nature in solution as a 
sea of love, and was full of the element in which he 
moved. It is enough if we be among the snowy- 
winged comrades in his convoy, though we follow in 
graceful freedom, and no rigid lines, the flag-ship. 

Our political union' has for its condition some honest 
reverence and loyalty, not any uniform faith. Let 
Christians cease their unchristian clamor to name 
their religion in the Constitution! God and Christ 
will be in it, unmentioned, when the government is 
just to black and white, to copper Indian and yellow 
Chinese. Equity to Jew and Mormon shall be our 
Book of Common Prayer. Protection of atheist and 
infidel is the best petition. More than thirty years 
ago, I was blamed for signing a request that Abner 
Kneeland should not be punished for blasphemy. A. 
venerable parishioner said it was the first mistake his 
young minister had made ; and the remark came to 
me for an admonition on the lips of a distinguished 
counsellor, afterwards judge, still living, but not dis- 
posed to move or consider such a bill of indictment 
now. 

Shall you fellowship the Radicals? If you find in 
them that reverence which is the root of sympathy ! 
" I did not go to Theodore Parker's meeting," said 
one ; " but I never knew one that did, who was not 
zealous for good works." Over the coflfin of a reputed 
sceptic that heresiarch said : " O God ! if he doubted 
thy being, he lived thy law." " We must have larger 
contribution-boxes in our great society," I heard a 



390 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

man inform the sexton ; and must we not, of our com- 
munion-board, make an extension-table? "I am a 
wide liker," said Allston, when somebody disparaged 
pictures of a style different from his own. " I prefer 
Mozart and Beethoven to Schubert," remarked one to 
Perabo : " they come down upon us with such an 
elephantine tread." The pianist replied : " This ele- 
phant is just as big, only a little further off! " A French 
writer tells us : " Not to praise warmly is a sure sign 
of intellectual mediocrity." It is a proof of irreligion, 
too. Contumely to man is disrespect for God. Ado- 
ration inspires magnanimity. An English hunter, in 
Omaha, coming suddenly upon a violet peeping out 
of the snow, could not pluck the flower, it so over- 
came him with thoughts of home. Remembering the 
homestead we all belong to, we shall be tender to our 
kind. 



XVII. 

IDEALITY. 

THE idealist we count impotent, only impressible 
as a photograph-plate ; prey of wandering fancy. 
But ideas are active powers to revolutionize and re- 
form. God is the great visionary, enacting his thought 
in every stage of his work. A late French writer 
holds that freedom to think and to speak implies free- 
dom to act with no let of law. In a perfect mind 
it does. But God, says one, is the only being who 
is thoroughly awake. All men are somnambulists. 
Their murder and theft, lying and lust, are a sort of 
sleep-walking. In a fine sense, Mr. Choate's defence 
of the famous Tirrell was true. But we share with 
the Creator as we open our eyes. 

First, as partners in making the world. What is 
the earth? Not so much crude bulk, finished when 
God rested on the seventh day. Is not the line of 
steamers. Pacific railway, telegraph wire, storm signal, 
mill on the stream, and Mont Cenis or Hoosac tun- 
nel, part of the universe as much as Niagara, the Mer- 
rimac, a hill in Switzerland, or the morning star? 
Is a picture less solid, a symphony more transient, than 
tree or rock? " The works of God are great," said an 



392 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

admirer of art, " but the works of man are wonderful ! " 
The Supreme Artist left his sketch for his children 
and pupils to complete ; and their orderly continuation 
is as good as his beginning. " Is your lecture done?" 
I asked my friend. " Never," he said. So with Nature. 
But in a deeper sense we co-act with Deity. Noth- 
ing is what it is in itself, but in its relation to every 
thing else ; and that relation is ideal. What a false 
notion, that, with none to behold it, the planet would 
be just the same ! It is nought, separate from sight. 
Could all that lives lie down in one mighty sepulchre, 
no constellation would shine on that grave. With- 
out perception, no light. God — infinite mind — said, 
" Let it be ; " but human intelligence was part of the 
fiat. 

This is no hypothesis, but a truth in which imagina- 
tion and science meet. Has matter a single independent 
property ? It looks, feels, smells, tastes, sounds, so we 
say ; but it could do no such thing without reason and 
the sensitive nerve. The secondary qualities — form, 
color, odor, audibleness, and touch — we all allow to 
be a spiritual addition to the outward scene. The pri- 
mary ones too, weight and extension, supposed in- 
herent in external things, are but part ; the intellect, 
counterpart and constituent ; space and time, modes of 
understanding. 

■ If the elements have intrinsic, why such shifting 
worth ? The dog looks on the same prospect with his 
master ; the lynx and vulture have a keener than the 
hunter's glance ; the eagle is said to gaze undazzled on 
the sun ; beasts and birds of night discern and find 
their way through what we call pitch dark. What 



^ 



IDEALITY. 



393 



but some new chamber in the brain or joint in the spy- 
glass reveals to us, in the common house, a size and 
store hid from their view ? To our ideality it expands 
into many mansions. To their sensuoslty it contracts 
to a den under ground, a nest in the tree, so much air 
to sail through, or so many holes to worry their game 
in. How low Hamlet, in his melancholy, reduced 
the sphere he so grandly described ! But to the hawk, 
what but a barn-yard is the land, or fish-pond the sea? 
Schopenhauer makes the world a mental projection ; 
and Wordsworth says the glories Nature lures us with 
are not hers, but born of a luminous cloud that issues 
from our own soul. To the Bible-seers she waxes old 
like a garment to be folded up, and flees before her 
King to find no place ; and how modern philosophy 
verifies ancient poetry, resolving masses and particles, 
heaven and earth. Into pure force ! But that such con- 
ceptions ever entered the head of any animal we want 
proof. I noticed a setter looking through a car-win- 
dow, and seeming to take some pleasure in surveying 
the landscape ; but his ear played active as his eye, 
and I queried whether he observed that integrity which 
is beauty, or was looking after his natural enemy, and 
watching if aught appeared he could serve his master's 
sport by beating the field to start. Without spectator 
were no spectacle fair and sublime. The mind is busy 
to make what It beholds. What signifies calling such 
doctrine the peculiarity of some moon-struck man? 
Nobody so practical or gross, so bent on his crop, grist, 
or hoard ; no hewer of wood or drawer of water ; no 
f smelter of ore or digger in the trench ; no cunning poli- 
tician or Tammany thief, — but, because he is a man, 



394 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

and of his human nature cannot be rid, must scan and 
construe the world differently from the brute. We all 
idealize, and only so realize ; for of no marriage but 
of the actual with the ideal is reality born. Mind is 
term, as it is source of matter ; and our thought a fac- 
tor of every thing. 

Our idea is a needful factor of the people too. 
" What do you make of him f " To the pure all 
things are pure, because they generate purity in what- 
ever they touch. Mephistopheles comes at the call of 
Faust ; but it is an ill-principled will that creates him, 
— not, in Shakspeare's phrase, " the heat-oppressed 
brain." Edmund Burke holds man a wise unwise ani- 
mal, and Thomas Carlyle calls the population of a coun- 
try forty millions " mostly fools." The difference of 
judgment shows how much higher on the scale of gen- 
ius the sober statesman reached, than the wilful though 
splendid pamphleteer. He that considers his race a 
knavish set betrays lack of that insight which produces 
their goodness. He is the Alfonso who could have 
counselled God ! To like your kind is your virtue and 
theirs. Sympathy is the hand to renew and eye to 
behold. In a smoking-car, amid cards and tobacco 
juice, and coarse words and peanut-shells, from horny- 
fisted lumbermen and brawny-necked sailors with brass 
rings in their ears, I have witnessed a politeness to give 
up their place to one less tired than they which few 
Boston parlors could match ; while well-dressed women 
of fashion in the train behind were covering: the seats 
with their spreading skirts and selfish bags. One 
woman told two lies, saying the seat was engaged. 
My thanks are not more for gentlemen and ladies than 



IDEALITY. 395 

for civil conductors, courteous brakemen, and grimy 
but smiling engineers. On what slight provocation of 
your fellowship the love and good works will come ! 
It was the making of him, we say of some small fur- 
therance of a young man. A country bachelor's 
objection to the fair sex was their liking to be made of. 
O strong and resolute husband, do you know how 
much you can make of that tender and malleable 
nature you name your wife? The woman lifts the 
man into her circle : the man sinks the woman to his ; 
but either can turn the other into a vessel of beauty or 
sharpened steel. In Eugene Sue's story the words 
heart and honor open to the vile Chourineur a new 
career. We, like God, create in our own image, and 
as he made every creature, " after his kind." I shall 
be to you what you ask, with your character as well 
as your tongue. 

A nation in its need regenerates its children. When 
some old friend of Jefferson Davis and political sympa- 
thizer with the South was startled from that leaning 
by the gun at Sumter into a war-democrat, why 
charge with being insincere one who is but patriot- 
ically new-born so to help the land, that the Confeder- 
ate president becomes not a martyr, but a cipher.'' The 
fouler the corruption, the purgation more sure ! If 
dirty water must fetch the pump, there is clean in the 
well. You cannot kill conscience more than oxygen. 
The thunderbolt forms and lurks in the heavy sky of 
municipal robbery and intrigue ; and the crashing of 
base authority in the metropolis of the land proves 
public virtue, in its excessive reserve, yet an over- 
match to annihilate official guilt, though more hands 



396 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

than appeared bore the stain of the enormous bribe. 
*' I would rather," said onej " be a door-keeper to the 
Committee of Seventy than dwell in the marble halls 
of Tweed." But how different a tune the moral sense 
has set for Tweed now to sing ! 

"I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls." 

When thieves refuse bail to their head, we see honesty 
rising as a power to break every wicked Ring. It is 
ideal holiness certain to conquer iniquity, and triumph 
over all shame. 

So we make the Christ of our faith. Christians are 
disturbed by any hint that their Saviour cannot be 
certainly drawn, with every word and prodigy, out of 
the historic details. What if we cannot circumstan- 
tially verify the image of the God-man? Is that image 
therefore a vapor that passeth away? Fact is never 
the ground of principle ; but principle the womb of 
fact. All the texts and wonders illustrate, but do not 
procreate spirit. We are grieved at discrepancies in 
the Gospel tales, and the impossibility of proving the 
miracles even if they occurred. But though, in the 
mouth of many witnesses, every word could be estab- 
lished, or the portents rewrought before our eyes, we 
could get from them no saving belief. Faith is a 
principle, not a conclusion. The test of a man is 
what he builds on, an incident or an idea. The letter 
that killeth is not only a written sentence, but every 
outward appearance. Sun and moon, sea and star, 
are but an alphabet. The world is God's metaphor ! 
All cognitions of sense are signs and counters of 
conception. We do not want a factitious redeemer. 



IDEALITY. 397 

A purely historic creed is the house Jesus spoke of, 
reared on the sand, and sure to go before the storm. 
None but the ideal underpinning will stand. A mira- 
cle over the greed of the multitude was noble ; but a 
multiplication of baked bread and fish that never grew 
as wheat or swam in the sea, what a lie of God or 
Nature ! The ideal foundation is so firm, every man's 
constitution forces him to fashion his Lord accordinsf 
to his light after his own heart. To the Jew Jesus was 
a stumbling-block, and to the Greek foolishness ; but 
to whoever believed, God's power and wisdom. To 
such as could receive him, he became righteousness 
and sanctification and redemption. Paul saw him, and 
Thomas did not ! To Mar}^ angels were in the sepul- 
chre, to Peter a linen roll. John the Baptist was a 
reed shaken in the wind, a figure in soft raiment, or a 
prophet in the van of the whole line, as the vision of 
one or another varied in the wilderness. Jesus was a 
Jew : the Christ was born of the wedded Greek and 
Jewish mind. I doubt not the depth of that immense 
personality would justify more than all we can say. 
But the personality is not constructible from any par- 
ticulars of the story without imaginative help. I 
should not believe the narratives so heartily, did they 
all four agree, or if Paul had nothing more to tell us 
than Mark. Eye-witnesses, every lawyer knows, 
always differ. Sir Walter Raleigh, noticing what di- 
verse accounts several relators, with equal opportunity, 
gave of the same events, wondered at his own under- 
taking to write annals, as if any thing could be exactly 
reported or found out. We say Genesis is a fable. Is 
Moses, or whoever wrote it, less trustworthy than 



39^ RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

Gibbon or Hume? We dispute about what was done 
by John Adams or General Greene. In a few years 
how many myths there will be respecting Abraham 
Lincoln and John Brown, and the power gone to dis- 
tinguish between fiction and fact ; but, as to the devo- 
tion to country and humanity, what doubt? 

If a man or clergyman is incapable of this spiritual 
idea of a divine humanit}'^ latent in every breast, pre- 
eminent in the Nazarene, he will not h^ at home in the 
Unitarian, Liberal, or Radical fold. Like a tired sol- 
dier, he will drop out of line : he will join some larger 
army for an easier march. Why have Spurgeon and 
Beecher more following than Martineau and Hedge? 
Because the ideal faculty is so feebly developed ; and 
the popular preachers are with the animal crowd, who 
must be met on their own level to be usefully served. 
Lament not the departure of whoever can act with 
more power elsewhere ! Doubtless men and ministers 
are sometimes misplaced. Had I any voice in the 
Church, I would recommend the custom in war, of an 
exchange of prisoners. 

Christ is the increment of Jesus, — the individual 
expanding to an ideal. He is spiritual formation, not 
literal fact. He is a creation of the human mind, not 
a deduction from particulars. He is a development, 
like his Church. But does not this view undermine 
his permanence? How can he so be "the same 
yesterday, to-day, and for ever " ? I answer his spiritu- 
ality is his durability. The interior is a citadel for him 
no hostility can shake. Were it but demonstrable facts 
he rested on, Christianity, like yonder sea-wall, would 
be washing away with every wave of time. Is the 



IDEALITY. 399 

solidity of the material world sapped by the science 
that proves its dependence on the mind ? No : this 
ideal quality is the reason it cannot, by God himself, 
be unmade. 

" He can create, and he destroy," 

writes the poet. The latter part of the proposition 
let me doubt! He cannot shake off this great-coat 
of Nature he wears. It is alive like himself. We 
piously say, He can do as he pleases. Can he contra- 
dict himself, commit suicide, break his own laws, 
annihilate a soul ? We are not independent of him : 
is he independent of us ? Not if I and my Father are 
one ; for the Father's unity is constituted by the child- 
hood, which is no accident or growth of time. 

I know the Trinitarian theory assumes a peculiar and 
limited sonship of Jesus, generated solitary and eter- 
nal. But the divine personality ^^generates thus into 
individuality. Two individuals were from everlasting, 
one Almighty, the other co-equal as co-eval ! Unita- 
rian people and priests backslide into this heresy from 
incapacity of that inward vision which comprehends 
in unity the Parent and all his house. Jesus effected 
the passage from the human to the divine for the com- 
mon-sense of mankind, like a man throwing the line 
across Niagara or Menai for the suspension-bridge. 
But on the firm structure once laid all men are as free 
to walk as himself, — nay, he but shows the way over 
an old road already made, though blocked up or over- 
grown. These sporadic cases of reaction to an ortho- 
dox or semi-orthodox faith only show who is weak 
and imperceptlve enough to be diverted by a false 



400 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

scent from the narrow way of that true dh'ection which 
intelligence and character are bound in fine to take, 
however the fondness of multitudinous sympathy se- 
duce into the broad one, to mistake large following 
for great ; while the votes that are to be weighed and 
not counted are cast by genius and science against the 
evangelical clamor of numerical superiority in disciples 
however zealous, and superficial preachers of whatever 
notable fame. This method of the ancient religion, 
spite of sceptics, will vindicate itself. Deism was the 
doctrine of God excluding, but theis?n including, Chris- 
tianity, — a singular aggrandizement of an identical 
term. The theist fulfils Paul's prophecy of the Son's 
subjection that God may be all in all ; for how absurd 
to make that a matter of chronology, instead of widen- 
ing inward sight ! 

This divine humanity, being the soul's essence, 
dates or derives not wholly from Christ. An Amer- 
ican bishop told me, when, being weary in his jour- 
ney, he dragged himself in a lonely by-way of India 
into a deserted hut, perhaps to die, one, of the most 
despised sect, rescued him and lent money to the stran- 
ger, trusting his remittance from Europe. What more 
coi31d Hebrew Rothschild or Christian Baring do? 
Not long since, in New Zealand, an Englishman, on 
some local charge, was ready by the savage execu- 
tioners to be cut down, when a woman whose husband 
the British had killed rose from the gloating dusky 
crowd, slowly w^alked across the space to the centre 
where the victim stood and the knives were half 
unsheathed, and sat down at his feet. At once fell 
paralyzed the hand of revenge ! The reprieved pris- 



IDEALITY. 401 

oner rose, mounted his horse and rode away. Can 
Christendom show aught more fine? The glory of 
the gospel is its education of mercy in the normal 
school of mankind. In this sign^ we conquer : the old 
Latin motto hints better victories than of arms. Walk- 
ing along the Western avenue last winter, on the low- 
est edge of the marsh I encountered a throng gazing 
curiously where the sluggish tide crept to and fro 
through the flats. Day after day I met them. They 
gathered month after month. A poor Irish girl had 
there been violated and murdered by a yet undiscovered 
man, to liken whom to any four-footed creature that 
crawls on its belly or honestly walks were insult to 
the beast. But that continual presence at the spot was 
human nature, — to pity the unfortunate and disown 
the shameful deed. I asked one wet-eyed lad if he 
knew her. No, he replied. But the Christian touch, 
to reach the lowest ignorance, was shown in rude 
carvings on the fence of the cross, beside the name 
of the doubly-slain, K. LeeJian^ from whose dread- 
ful struggles the compassion of God released the soul, 
while the Christian compunction in fellow-creatures 
would do more than any execution on the gibbet to 
prevent repeated crime. 

The test of Christianity is not any substitute or me- 
diation, but closer introduction of Deity. The China- 
man in San Francisco, lazy at his work of dusting the 
church, hearing the shout of the concealed sexton, 
cried out, God^ is that you ? — his own conscience 
becoming the God of the temple to rebuke his sloth. 
i The Israelites made them gods of gold. We, too, 
have a hand to make our God after our mind. God 

26 



403 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

made man in his own image ; and man, it has been 
said, returns the compliment by making God in his. 
How else can he make him ? Making God a person 
is objected to as confining him to human measure. 
What measure have we else ? Can we get beyond our 
own thought? A God foreign to human nature is none. 
If He be not implicated in us, and we in Him, He is 
not, and we were not ! Your God will be no better 
than you, — your inmost self. "Like master, like 
man," runs the old proverb. Like owner^ like dog^ 
we might add ; for I have noticed how the mastiff at 
the gate represented the occupant of the house, and 
they would be surly or sweet together, — the man a 
commentary on the dog, the dog on the man. Per- 
haps natural selection of the animal, or careful culti- 
vation, or the dog's keeping good or bad company, 
accounts for the remarkable fact ! 

We must retain or do away with God and Christ 
and man all together. A Spiritualist correspondent 
insists that the Christian Deity must go. The castle 
of faith will stand not by any literal, but an ideal, 
defence. Based on any text, with any miracle for its 
corner-stone, or special pre-existence for its cement, 
its architecture will crumble under the blows of criti- 
cism, or yield to the tooth of time. As an existence 
and entity in the human soul, suggested, illustrated, 
and confirmed by recorded words and events, it will 
sui*vive. The assailant of true Christianity will not 
have the easy victory he beforehand so loudly boasts. 
He is fighting not a doubtful register, but an Ideal of 
the human mind, formed from many an age and race, 
with solidarity of communion through a hundred 



IDEALITY. 403 

generations and what woven fellowship of manifold 
tongues ! He defies an inward standard, with a meta- 
physical phrase. Whatever new dispensation may 
arrive, the old banner will not be hauled down before 
any ambitious individual flag. No private notion 
or interpretation can prevail over the force of the 
common life, the general incarnation of truth, and 
embodiment of the Holy Ghost. 

We, like Paul, may claim to work with God 
forming others and ourselves. Character is creation, 
his and ours. But what God? No dogma of the 
Bible, or abstraction of the mind, no internal particle 
peculiar to an individual, but the atmosphere of souls! 
God makes man, but not any one man, in his image. 
Each of us has but a share in his likeness. It takes 
us all to make it. " I must," said one, " act my own 
ideal." Nobody owns one ! It is common, and owns 
him : not possessed or originated by any person, — 
Jesus more than Judas ; but an admitted law claiming 
all for its inspiration and property, repudiated by 
come-outers and seceders from that faith and instinct 
of their kind by which every renovator from Luther 
to Bismarck is stirred; and cutting off from which, 
to be agitator and destructive is all one can attain. 
No greatness or goodness stands alone. TenerifFe and 
Katahdin seem solitary, — unlike Mont Blanc, which 
is the last uprise of a thousand, or Mount Wash- 
ington amid its cabinet of hills ; but the granite 
of the Maine mountain joins it to the New Hamp- 
shire range, and the volcanic tufa near the African 
shore reaches to Madeira and Fayal. So the monu- 
ments of human genius and virtue tower from some 



404 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

general base. The triumphs of literature and art, 
in Homer and y^schylus, Shakspeare and Milton, 
Michel Angelo and Raphael, grew from a soil, fed 
on a stream, flourished in an air of congenial circum- 
stances and favoring events, in Britain and Italy and 
Greece ; to make such delegates to all countries of 
their own land, and spokesmen for the age of Eliza- 
beth, Pericles, or the Pope. A great naturalist thinks 
the universe of life sprang from no single vesicle or 
monad, but an ocean of germs ; and the human com- 
niunity has put forth all nobilities of private worth as 
leaves. O complainer of the multiplication of your 
kind, which samples will you reject ? Your own is a 
specimen to be saved ! Little sinner^ we say to the 
babe : what n^ er-do-well has blossomed at last into 
your virtue? England, New England, Virginia, New 
York, shrinks from the sight of its own cradle. 

Have we a natural right to vote ourselves im- 
mortal ? No, we must earn our heaven, laboring with 
God 1 Continuance is the incident of immortality, 
truth the essence, love the assurance ; and this a 
contribution to our conviction from our kind. The 
separate soul could never credit an endless life ! My 
faith is a flower out of the stem on the stock of my 
race ; and, without these encouraging affections, I 
were a helpless infidel. They teach me identity with 
my Source ; that the world is not a whim which the 
Almighty after a past eternity took it into his head to 
make, but an expression inextricable from that being 
his goodness names. Love informs, when it rests in 
its object and does not cat-like rub round it to come 
back again, resembling the devotion that beats and 



IDEALITY. 



405 



breaks the idol which does not in danger deliver the 
devotee. Of that love which is the acquisition of sacri- 
fice, time cannot rob us, nor God will. This natural 
communism of spiritual worth, this concrete trust in 
God and destiny, the Power will justify which in- 
stigated and ordained. The Fashioner forsakes not 
the work of his own hands. No metaphysic sponge 
can wipe off from the black-board of history fact or 
wonder which the miraculous soul begets. From 
my balloon, staging, or ladder, I may have to come 
down ; but not from the elevation to which the rising 
spiritual continent lifts ; and from that the perfect 
whole is the view ! Youth may rejoice without the 
vision ; but old age is dismal if it lay not hold of 
eternal life. " Five minutes to the cataract^^ shouted 
a German to an Englishman abroad, gliding down a 
river in his canoe. How near are we to the final 
plunge? We want the beaver's sense to double-line 
his dam against unwonted cold ! By no theory or 
ceremony can we be guided and sustained. To know 
Christ's rank will be nought to breathing his love. 
The stained windows that make corpses of the con- 
gregation will throw no light on the last darkness. 
Only One, revealed within, whom we partake of, can 
be our Sun and Shield. To call God an Idea, some 
think, makes him unreal. But the Ideal is the Real. 
To speak of an ideal, is to speak of an imagined but 
not imaginary Christ. " Is not this the son of 
Mary ? " the gaping wonderers asked. It was, and 
something more ! Which was true, — the girl Beatrice, 
Dante saw in the street, or the glory in Paradise? 
His fancy exaggerated not, but fell short. Why did 



406 RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

the cross I gazed at, cut with a jackknife on the 
unplaned board, enlarge to my eye, outshining those 
on cathedral spires? It was an Inner Light mixing 
with the beams of the sun ! What makes immor- 
tality? No selfish wish. I shall be immortal if any- 
body wants me to be. If I am not wanted in heaven, 
I will not go ! But God, who is my Cause, is my 
Causeway. Prayer is his inhalation and exhalation 
in my breast. 

Because Jesus felt this, he is representative between 
both parties, and joins man with God. To call him 
ideal is not to deny he is personal ; for ideal, real, 
and personal are all the same. Wind and sound, 
spirit and person, how he, whose life is a divine 
sonnet, identifies in his talk with Nicodemus ! He 
was the sounding forth of the mind of Him whose 
own personality is the meaning of all the motion of 
the world ; but whose word and image the whole 
humanity is, more than any one member, though 
with title of Christ ; and the date of whose road and 
right of way to the soul what man or angel can tell ? 
When, in some famous biography, the literal Jesus is 
put for the infinite God, in childish ignorance of all 
scholarship and science, we must needs have a new 
spiritual departure in religion, lest, in the yawning 
gulf between ecclesiasticism and common sense, the 
Church as a school of honesty and wisdom be swal- 
lowed up. That Ideal, insulated in no individual, is 
not all above, but stoops to our side. "You may," 
one said, " idealize your wife ; but you cannot kiss 
the portrait you make." Nay, nothing but the por- 
trait can you kiss ! The ideal is the real woman : 



IDEALITY. 407 

the flesh and blood are but the painting or pigments 
with which, by the Artist, the picture is ever improved. 
When you put her into any act of sense she is gone ! 
In your definition of her she dies. Only as represen- 
tative of spirit is she yours. " In thee," said the ex- 
piring Bunsen to his wife, " I have loved the Eternal." 
That is not love for any mortal which stops short of 
the unseen. 



Cambridge : Printed by John Wilson & Son. 



ARTHUR HELPS'S WRITINGS. 



1. REALM AH. A Story. Price $2.00. 

2. CASIMIR MAREMMA. A Novel. Price $2.00. 

3. COMPANIONS OF MY SOLITUDE. Price $1.50. 

4. ESSAYS WRITTEN IN THE INTERVALS OF BUS- 

INESS. Price $1.50. 
K. BREVIA Short Essays and Aphorisms. Price $1.50. 

From the London Review. 
*' The tale (Realmah) is a comparatively brief one, intersected by the 
conversations of a variety of able personages, with most of whose names 
and characters we are already familiar through 'Friends in Council.* 
Looking at it in connection with the social and political lessons that are 
wrapt up in it, we may fairly attribute to it a higher value than could pos- 
sibly attach to a common piece of riction." 

From a Notice by Miss E. M. Converse. 

"There are many reasons why we like this irregular book (Realmah), in 
which we should find the dialogue tedious without the story; the story dull 
without the dialogue; and the whole unmeaning, unless we discerned the 
purpose of the author underlying the lines, and interweaving, now here, 
now there, a criticism, a suggestion, an aphorism, a quaint illustration, an 
exhortation, a metaphysical deduction, or a moral inference. 

" We like a book in which we are not bound to read consecutively, whose 
leaves we can turn at pleasure and find on every page something to amuse, 
interest, and instruct. It is like a charming walk in the woods in early 
summer, where we are attracted now to a lowly flower half hidden under 
soft moss ; no\v to a shrub brilliant with sho%vy blossoms ; now to the gran- 
deur of a spreading tree ; now to a bit o*" ^eecy cloud ; and now to the blue 
of the overarching sky. 

"We gladly place ' Realmah ' on the * book-lined wall,' by the side of 
other chosen friends, — the sharp, terse sayings of the * Doctor ' ; the sug- 
gestive utterances of the * Noctes '; the sparkling and brilliant thoughts of 
•Montaigne ' ; and the gentle teachings of tlie charming * Elia.' " 

From a Not ice by Miss H. W, Preston, 
" It must be because the reading world is unregenerate that Arthur Helps 
Is not a general favorite. Somebody once said (was it Ruskin, at whose 
imperious order so many of us read ' Friends in Council,' a dozen years 
ago?) that appreciation of Helps is a sure test of culture. Not so much 
that, one may suggest, as of a certain native fineness and excellence of 
mind. The impression prevails among some of those v.'ho do not read hin:, 
that Helps is a hard writer. Nothing could be more erroneous. His man- 
ner is simplicity itself; his speech always winning, and of a silvery dis- 
tinctness. There are hosts of ravenous readers, lively and capable, who, 
if their vague prejudice were removed, would exceedingly enjoy the gentle 
wit, the unassuming wisdom, and the refreshing originality of the author 
in question. There are men and women, mostly young, with souls that 
sometimes weary of the serials, who need nothing so much as a persuasive 
guide to the study of worthier and more enduring literature. For most of 
those who read novels with avidity are capable of reading something else 
with avidity, if they only knew it. And such a guide, and pleasantest of all 
such guides, is Arthur Helps. * * Yet 'Casimir Maremma' is a charming 
book, and, better still, invigorating. Try it. You are going into tJie country 
for the. summer months that remain. Have ' Casimir' with you, and have 
' Realmah,' too. The former is the pleasanter book, the latter the more pow« 
erful. But if you like one you will like the other. At the least you will rise 
from their perusal with a grateful sense of having been received for a time 
into a select and happy circle, where intellectual breeding i.s perfect, and the 
struggle for brilliancy unknown. 

Sold everywhere. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of adver- 
tised price, by the Publishers, 



ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



Messrs. Roberts Brothers^ Publications. 



THE GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS OF THE DAY. 

E C C E H O M O. 
EOCE DEUS. 



Although It Is now two years since the publication of " Ecce Homo," and on« 
?ear since " Ecce Deus " appeared, the sale of these extraordinary and remarkable 
books continues quite as large as ever. Some of the ablest and most cultiTated 
minds in the world have been devoted to a critical analysis of them. 

The foremost man in England, the Right Honorable W. E. Gladstone, has just 
published a book devoted entirely to a review of " Ecce Homo," in which he uses 
the following language : — 

" To me it appears that each page of the book breathes out, as it proceeds, what 
we may call an air, which gi'ows musical by degrees, and which, becoming more 
distinct even as it swells, takes form, as in due time we find, in the articulate con- 
clusion, ' Surely, tiiis is the Son of God ; surelj\ this is the King of Heaven.' " 

Of " Ecce Deus," which may be considered the complement of " Ecce Homo," 
there are almost as many admirers, the sale of both books being nearly alike. 

Both volumes bound uniformly Sold separately. Price of each, ^1.50. 

Prof. Ingraham's Works. 

THE PRINCE OF THE HOUSE OF DAVID; or, Thre«' 

Yejirs in the Holy City. 

THE PILLAR OF FIRE ; or, Israel m Bondage. 

THE THRONE OF DAVID ; from the Consecration cf the Shepherd 
of Bethlehem to the Rebellion of Prince Absalom. 

The extraordinary interest evinced in these books, from the date of their pub- 
lication to the present time, has in no wise abated. The demand for them Is still 
tUB large as ever. 

In three volumes, 12mo, cloth, gilt, with illustrations. Sold separately. Prict 
of each, $2.00. 

The Heaven Series. 

HEAVEN OUR HOME. We have no Savioui but Jesus, and no Horn* 
but Heaven. 

MEET FOR HEAVEN. A State of Grace upon Earth the onlj Prei>». 

ration for a State of Glory in Heaven. 
LIFE IN HEAVEN. There Faith is changed into Sight, and Hope is 

passed into Blissful Fruition. 
F'om Rev. SarAuel L. Tuttle., Assistant Secretary of thf American Bibli Soctety. 

'* I wish that every Christian person could have the perusal of these writings. 
f pan never be sufficiently thankful to him who wrote them for the service that he 
tias rendered to me and all others. They have given /orm a?id substance to every 
iHing revealed in the Scriptures respt'/ting our heafenhj home of love, and they 
have d'Jne not a little to invest it with the most powerful attractions to my heart. 
?nice I bive enjoyed the privilege of following the thought of their author, 1 have 
felt that there was a reality in all these things which I haye never felt before ; and 
I find myself often thanking God for putting it into the heart of a poor worm of 
the dust to spread such glorious representations before our race, aU of whom 
itand in need of such a rest." 

In three volumes, 16uio. Sold separately. Price of each, $1 26. 

Mailed, post-paid, to any address, on receipt of the price by the publisher* 

10 



■mM 



MESSRS. ROBERTS BROTHERS' PUBLICATIONS. 



REV. C. A. BARTOUS NEW BOOK. 

RADICAL PROBLEMS. 

By rev. C. a. BARTOL, D.D. 

Contents. — Open Questions ; Individualism; Transcen- 
dentalism; Radicalism; Theism; Naturalism; Materialism; 
Spiritualism; Faith ; Law; Origin; Correlation; Character; 
Genius: Father Tajlor; Experience; Hope; Ideality. 

One volume^ i6mo. Cloth. Price $2.00. 



PROFESSOR PARSONS' S NEW BOOK, 

The Infinite and The Finite. 

By THEOPHILUS PARSONS. 

AUTHOR OF "dEUS HOMO," ETC. 

One neat i67no vohcme. Cloth. Price $1.00. 

"No one can know," says the author, "better than I do, how poor and dim a 
presentation of a great truth my words must give. But I write them in the hope 
that they may suggest to some minds what may expand in their minds into a truth, 
and, germinating there, grow and scatter seed-truth widely abroad. I am sure 
only of this : The latest revelation offers truths and principles which promise to 
give to man a knowledge of the laws of his being and of his relation to God, — of 
the relation of the Infinite to the Finite. . . . And therefore I believe that it will 
gradually, — it may be very slowly, so utterly does it oppose man's regenerate 
nature, — but it will surely advance in its power and in its influence, until, in its 
own time, it becomes what the sun is in unclouded noon." 



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ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



MESSRS. ROBERTS BROTHERS' PUBLICATIONS. 



The To-Morrow of Death ; 

OR, 

THE FUTURE LIFE ACCORDING 
TO SCIENCE. 

By LOUIS FIGUIER. 

Translated from the French, by S. R. Crocker, i vol. i6mo. $2.00. 



Front the Literary World, 
As its striking, if somewhat sensational title indicates, the book deals with the 
question of the future life, and purports to present "a complete theory of Nature, 
a true philosophy of the Universe." It is based on the ascertained facts of science 
which the author marshals in such a multitude, and with such skill, as must com- 
mand the admiration of those who dismiss his theory with a sneer. We doubt if 
the marvels of astronomy have ever had so impressive a presentation in popular 
form as they have here. . . . 

The opening chapters of the book treat of the three elements which compose 
man, — body, soul, and life. The first is not destroyed by death, but simply changes 
its form ; the last is a force, like light and heat, — a mere state of bodies ; the soul 
is indestructible and immortal. After death, according to M. Figuier, the soul be- 
comes incarnated in a new body, and makes part of a new being next superior to 
man in the scale of living existences, — the superhuman. This being lives in the 
ether which surrounds the earth and the other planets, where, endowed with senses 
and faculties like ours, infinitely improved, and many others that we know nothing 
of, he leads a life whose spiritual delights it is impossible for us to imagine. . . . 
Those who enjoy speculations about the future life will find in this book fresh and 
pleasant food for their imaginations ; and, to those who delight in the revelations 
of science as to the mysteries that obscure the origin and the destiny of man, these 
pages offer a gallery of novel and really marvellous views. We may, perhaps, ex- 
press our opinion of "The To-Morrow of Death "at once comprehensively and 
concisely, by saying that to every mind that welcomes light on these grave ques- 
tions, from whatever quarter and in whatever shape it may come, regardless of 
precedents and authorities, this work will yield exquisite pleasure. It will shock 
some readers, and amaze many ; but it will fascinate and impress all. 



Sold everywhere. Mailed, j)ost-jbaid.) by the Publishers, 

LTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



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